2022 Writers Week Festival
Coriolis is working on an awareness campaign, promoting and publicizing the 45th Annual UCR Writers Week Festival. This is the longest-running free literary festival in California, and we’re proud to be involved in bringing more awareness to it this year, as we have in previous years, too.
The first time Writers Week went virtual was in 2021, due to the pandemic and related shutdown of UC Riverside. Moving the festival online has proven to be a blessing in disguise, as it made the event available far beyond the university campus community, Inland Empire, and general audience in Southern California who attend annually. It also opened an avenue for more diverse authors around the world to read and participate in the event, and for national and international attendees to enjoy the event from the comfort and safety of their homes.
Writers Week is presented on the video platform Crowdcast allowing for a capacity of over 1,000 attendees during each session and audience interaction during live Q&As. In order to make the literary festival fully accessible, live video captioning and ASL captioning will also be implemented.
The posters for the 45th UCR Writers Week Festival.
The festival’s lineup is as impressive as ever. Aside from the three U.S. Poet Laureates Sandra Cisneros, Linda Hogan and Ishmael Reed, who will each be honored with the annual LA Review of Books/ UCR Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Awards, also featured on this year’s event is the D. Charles Whitney Reader Luis J. Rodriquez, who will be reading Feb. 19 at 4:30 p.m. with Stephen Minot Lecturer, Cornelius Eady.
Other readers include Emily Rapp Black, Kate Bonnici, Joy Castro, Anthony Cody, Lewis DeSoto, Steve Erickson, Molly Fisk, Carribean Fragoza, Sesshu Foster, Edgar Gomez, Kimberly Guerrero, Daisy Hernandez, Gordon Lee Johnson, John Kinsella, Diane Lefer, Antonio de Jesús López, Tom Lutz, Isabella Madrigal, Sophia Madrigal, Juanita Mantz, Chloe Martinez, Rupa Marya, Rajiv Mohabir, Amanda Moore, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Daniel Olivas, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Jasmine Elizabeth Smith, Susan Straight, Kim Shuck, Moheb Soliman, Richard Van Camp, Elissa Washuta, Kyle Lucia Wu, Luo Ying, anthology contributors from XLA Poets & Tlaculix, and musical guests The Cornelius Eady Trio & April & The Fishes. Also featured are UCR MFA Candidates Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts.
Each session will begin with a welcome and an introduction, followed by each writer reading from their latest works. A live Q&A will follow each reading, allowing audience members to ask the speakers questions.
We hope that you will be able to join and enjoy this free festival. You can find the full schedule here. Each session on the schedule links directly to Crowdcast, where you can place reservations and return on the day of the event to join live.
We are working with Allison Hedge Coke, Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of Writers Week, to promote the festival and ensure that it is well attended and widely known.
