2021 Writers Week Festival
Coriolis is working on an awareness campaign, promoting and publicizing the 44th Annual UCR Writers Week Festival.
The ongoing shutdown of UC Riverside due to COVID-19 was the reason for transitioning to a virtual format, but doing so has 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 other diverse slate authors around the world to perform in the event and for greater California and other 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 1000 attendees during each session and audience interaction during live Q&As. A Facebook Live and YouTube Live will also be broadcast simultaneously. In order to be fully accessible this year, live video captioning and ASL captioning will also be implemented.
The posters for the 44th UCR Writers Week Festival.
Aside from the three U.S. Poet Laureates Rita Dove, Joy Harjo, and Juan Felipe Herrera, 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 2020 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize winner and UCR Emeritus Professor Mike Davis, who will be reading Feb. 18 at 3:30 p.m. with creative writing professor and award-winning author Laila Lalami.
Other readers include Millicent Borges Accardi, Kazim Ali, Francisco Aragón, Joseph Cassara, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Camille T. Dungy, Carolyn Dunn, Steve Erickson, Kelli Jo Ford, Reyna Grande, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Nalo Hopkinson, LeAnne Howe, John Jennings, Stephen Graham Jones, Brandy Nālani McDougall, Shin Yu Pai, Craig Santos Perez, Tommy Pico, Elizabeth Powell, Kamala Puligandla, Alison C. Rollins, Jane Smiley, Michael Torres, Melissa Valentine, Allison Benis White, and more.
Each session will begin with a welcome and an introduction, followed by each writer reading from their latest works. A virtual live Q&A will follow each reading, allowing audience members to ask the speakers questions. Also featured are an MFA reading and UCR’s Writers Resist Reading.
We hope that you will be able to join and enjoy this free festival. You can find the full schedule here. Each session in the schedule links directly to Crowdcast, where you can place reservations and return the day-of the event.
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.
