The West Virginia Book Festival is an annual event for book lovers of all ages and! Featuring programs by local and international bestselling authors, a Used Book Sale, and a Festival Marketplace, it takes place at the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center in downtown Charleston, West Virginia.
West Virginia Book Festival Attendance is (and always will be) free of cost.
Visit http://www.wvbookfestival.org/ for more details!
Marc Harshman presents a night of poetry at Taylor Books with Jesse Graves, youth poets from Poetry Out Loud and the WV Youth Laureate programs. Representing Poetry Out Loud is Carson Misch, and Clay Dusenbury will join as the current West Virginia Youth Poet Laureate.
Date: Friday, October 10th
Time: 6pm
Location: Taylor Books, 226 Capitol St.
Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.
Marc Harshman presents a night of poetry at Taylor Books with Steve Scafidi and youth poet from Poetry Out Loud, Willow Peyton. Joining them will be Youth Poet Laureate representatives, Caterina Occhione and Mariam Hamdan.
This event is free and open to the public.
Steve Scafidi is the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), For Love of Common Words (LSU 2006), The Cabinetmaker’s Window (LSU 2014), To the Bramble and the Briar (University of Arkansas Press, 2014) and a chapbook Songs for the Carry-On (Q Avenue Press, 2013). He has won the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and the Miller Williams Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has taught at several universities including, most recently, in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.
Curated and hosted by WV Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman, this year’s panel will feature award-winning journalists Eric Eyre, Erin Beck, and Amelia Ferrell Knisely.
Each will read selections from their works, share insights regarding the field of journalism and reflect upon the current state of the literary world. The authors will also be open to audience Q&A.
This project is being presented with financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state affiliate for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations do not necessarily represent those of the West Virginia Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Have a few minutes to help us out? We’d love to hear from you! Take our survey below – and of course want to hear more about any event ideas and what you’d like to see at future FestivALL events!
Marc Harshman hosts an evening of poetry readings and then the floor will be opened to attendees for discussion/Q&A.
Harshman’s WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize and was published in 2018 by Lynx House / University of Washington Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER…, co-authored with Anna Smucker, was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017 and was an Amazon Book of the Month. He is also co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Harshman’s newest collection of poems, THE SHADOW TESTIMONIES, has just been scheduled for publication by Salmon Press in the Republic of Ireland.
Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia.
Maggie Anderson was born in New York city in 1948. She moved to West Virginia when she was 13 years old, and attended public schools and West Virginia Wesleyan College (1966-1968) and West Virginia University. She received a B.A. in 1970 and an M.A. in creative writing in 1973. Anderson is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dear All (Four Way Books, 2017). She is also the author of Windfall: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), A Space Filled with Moving (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), Cold Comfort (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986), Years That Answer (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1980), Greatest Hits: 1984-2004 (Columbus: Pudding House Publications, 2004), and The Great Horned Owl (Riderwood: Icarus Press, 1979). She is the founding editor of the Wick Poetry First Book Series and the Wick Poetry Chapbook Series for Ohio Poets. In 1971 she co-founded Trellis, a poetry journal, with Winston Fuller and Irene McKinney, and served as editor until 1981. She is currently working on a novel.
Anderson’s awards and honors include two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and grants from the Ohio Arts Council and the MacDowell Colony, including an Isabella Gardner Fellowship. In 2004, Emory and Henry College in Virginia honored her at their 23rd annual Appalachian Literary Festival, and Kent State University honored her with a Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2003, she received the Helen and Laura Kraut Memorial Ohioana Poetry Award from the Ohioana Library Association. In 2002, the KSU Alumni Association awarded her one of just three University Distinguished Teaching Awards. Anderson also received the B.B. Maurer WV Folklife Scholar Award from Fairmont State University, Fairmont, WV, for an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the preservation and perpetuation of Appalachian cultural heritage.
Anderson attended West Virginia Wesleyan College from 1966–68 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English, with high honors, from West Virginia University in 1970. Her M.A. in English (Creative Writing) in 1973 and an M.S.W. in 1977 were also from WVU. She worked as a rehabilitation counselor for blind and visually impaired clients at the West Virginia Rehabilitation Center from 1973-77. Beginning in 1979, she worked as poet-in-residence for ten years, in schools, senior centers, correctional facilities and libraries in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. She has served as visiting writer at several universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Oregon, the Pennsylvania State University, Hamilton College, and West Virginia University. In addition to her travels in the United States, Anderson has lived in Denmark (1992–1993) and traveled extensively throughout western and eastern Europe, Russia, and Scandinavia.
Anderson’s poems have been published in poetry journals, including The American Poetry Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, and Hamilton Stone Review, and her work has appeared in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. Essays have appeared in 17 anthologies and journals of contemporary poetry and poetics. Her poems have been set to music four times by contemporary composers, including “The Dream Vegetables” in Dreams and Nocturnes: Chamber Music of Stephen Gryc, “In Singing Weather” by Monica Houghton, “Nightmare,” by Anne LeBaron, and “Related to the Sky” from “Sun Songs and Nocturnes” by John David Earnest, an a cappella piece for male chorus performed at Lincoln Center in 1992 by Chanticleer and the New Jersey Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1989, Anderson began teaching creative writing at Kent State University and was appointed coordinator of the Wick Poetry Program in 1992. In 2004, when the Wick Poetry Program celebrated its 20th anniversary and received a $2 million endowment to create the Wick Poetry Center in the College of Arts and Sciences, Anderson was named director. Anderson was on the founding committee of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and served as Kent State University’s Campus Coordinator for the NEOMFA from 2003–2006 and as Director of the Northeast Ohio MFA Consortium from 2006-2009. Upon her retirement from Kent in 2009, the Maggie Anderson Endowment Fund was established in her honor. The Fund aims to assist talented writing students at the university with writing-related travel expenses.
The current Youth Poet Laureate for WV.
Past champion of the WV Poetry Out Loud competition.
Have a few minutes to help us out? We’d love to hear from you! Take our survey below – and of course want to hear more about any event ideas and what you’d like to see at future FestivALL events!