Lisa Neely
Silas House
Stacey Isom
The Lee University Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages will host a Writer’s Festival Thursday-Saturday. The event will begin with a discussion with Lisa Neely at 4 p.m. on Thursday in the Edna Minor Conn Theatre, followed by a reading from fiction writer Silas House at 8 p.m. in the Dixon Center.
Stacey Isom will present a staged reading of “On the 8s” directed by Lisa Neely in the Edna Minor Conn Theatre at 8 p.m. on Friday.
The festival will conclude on Saturday with the Sigma Tau Delta Symposium from 10 a.m.-12 p.m.
in the Humanities Building followed by staged readings of Jordan Davis’s Elephants and Jessie Wright’s Night Music, student plays that won the One-Act Play Contest. The readings will be directed by Lisa Neely in the Edna Minor Conn Theatre.
Lisa Neely has directed, acted, and taught theatre for several years. Her work ranges from the Greek classics to mime and new play development. She was awarded best director by Portfolio magazine of Hampton Roads, VA, for her production of Medea.
Among her favorite experiences was her time in Cleveland, as artistic director of Red Clay Theatre, where she directed The Fantasticks, The Importance of Being Earnest, Smokin’ Devils, and Fully Committed. She currently resides in Austin, Tx.
Silas House is the bestselling author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Cool Tattoo, and Eli the Good, the nonfiction work Something’s Rising (with co-author Jason Howard), and two plays, The Hurting Part and Long Time Travelling.
He is a past recipient of the Appalachian Writer of the Year, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Kentucky Novel of the Year, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and many other honors.
His writing has appeared in Oxford American, Newsday, The Louisville Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Sierra, and many other magazines and anthologies. House serves as the writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University and is on the fiction faculty at the Spalding University MFA in Creative Writing.
Stacey Isom, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Lee University, received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University, where she was the recipient of a teaching assistantship, as well as the David Scott Sutelan Memorial Award.
Her play Letters to John Lennon was nominated for three Portfolio Awards. Her play Smokin’ Devils received a staged reading in The Barter Theatre’s Festival of Appalachian Plays & Playwrights, a production at Red Clay Theatre, and was awarded 2nd Place in Plays for the 21st Century by The Playwright’s Theatre. Her one-act play Touching Aurora has been produced by the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. A Proportional Response received an Honorable Mention in First Stage LA’s One-Act Contest and a staged reading at First Stage LA’s Playwright’s Express.
Isom is also a Fellow of the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.
These sessions are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Stacey Isom at sisom@leeuniversity.edu or at 614-8669.