Frank X Walker Festival -- October 23-24
This year the festival honors Kentucky poet Frank X Walker, the author of four collections of poetry: Affrilachia (2000), Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), Black Box (2006), and When Winter Come: The Ascension of York (2008). In 2007, Walker edited the poetry collection America! What's My Name: The Other Poets Unfurl the Flag for Wind Publications. Buffalo Dance won the 2004 Lillian Smith Award, and in 2005 Walker received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry. He is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at Northern Kentucky University. Recently he began editing and publishing PLUCK!: The Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture.
Walker's poems have been converted into a stage production by the University of Kentucky Theatre Department and widely anthologized in numerous collections, including The Appalachian Journal, Limestone, Roundtable, My Brothers Keeper, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. He is a former contributing writer and columnist for Ace Weekly and the first Kentucky writer to be featured on NPR's This I Believe.
He has lectured, conducted workshops, read poetry and exhibited at over 300 national conferences and universities including the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry, Northern Ireland; Santiago, Cuba; University of California at Berkeley; Notre Dame; Louisiana State University at Alexandria; University of Washington; Virginia Tech; Radford University; and Appalachian State University.
Books By Frank X Walker
- Affrilachia
- Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York
- Black Box
- When Winter Come: The Ascension of York
Other Publications
- America! What's My Name: The Other Poets Unfurl the Flag
- PLUCK!: The Journal of Affrilachian Art & Culture
- FrankXWalker.com
Events
- Thursday, Oct. 23
- 2:30 p.m.
New World and Third World Confluence: The New Historicist/Postcolonial Poetry of Affrilachian Frank X Walker, Theresa Burriss, Radford University
- 3:30 p.m.
We Can Be Solutions: Frank X Walker as Catalyst for Student Inquiry and Action, Susan Mead, Ferrum College
- 7:30 p.m. Public Reading, Frank X Walker
- Friday, Oct. 24
- 2:30 p.m.
Frank X: Affrilachia Genesis, Gurney Norman
- 3:30 p.m. Public Interview with Frank X Walker conducted by Jim Minick, Radford University
New World and Third World Confluence: The New Historicist/Postcolonial Poetry of Affrilachian Frank X Walker, Theresa Burriss, Radford University
We Can Be Solutions: Frank X Walker as Catalyst for Student Inquiry and Action, Susan Mead, Ferrum College
Frank X: Affrilachia Genesis, Gurney Norman
All these events will be held in the Board of Visitors Lounge, Van Dyke Center. They are free of charge and open to the public.
About the Festival
The Emory & Henry Literary Festival began in 1982 with a program devoted to Sherwood Anderson, who spent the final fifteen years of his life in nearby Smyth County, Virginia. Since that inaugural occasion the festival has honored a living writer with strong ties to the Appalachian region, an author who comes to campus for a reading and a public interview and who listens to two or three papers about her/his work.
The proceedings of each festival, along with some new writing by the featured author, are published in an annual issue of the College's Iron Mountain Review. Eight of the essays from these festivals were reprinted in An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature (2005). The interviews conducted at the festivals from 1983 to 2003 have been reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press in Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (2006).
Iron Mountain Review
Editor's Note from the 25th Anniversary Issue
The 2006 Literary Festival marked the twenty-fifth such event sponsored by Emory & Henry College. The proceedings of each festival have been published in an issue of The Iron Mountain Review, starting with the Sherwood Anderson issue in the spring of 1983. That issue is now unavailable, but limited quantities of each of the others remain. They include issues on James Still, Fred Chappell, Lee Smith, John Ehle, Jim Wayne Miller, Wilma Dykeman, Robert Morgan, Mary Lee Settle, Charles Wright, David Huddle, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Daniel Marion, Meredith Sue Willis, Gurney Norman, Jo Carson, Denise Giardina, George Scarbrough, Lisa Alther, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Michael McFee, Ron Rash, Maggie Anderson, Sharyn McCrumb, and Michael Chitwood, together with special numbers on the Holston River and on the poetry and artwork of Michael Martin.
Back issues of IMR may be ordered from the editor at a cost of $5 each, which includes the price of postage. Checks should be made payable to The Iron Mountain Review. For more information write Dr. John Lang, PO Box 64, Emory, VA 24327 or email jlang@ehc.edu
Table of contents for the 25th Anniversary issue.
Contact
John Lang, Department of English
Emory & Henry College
PO Box 947
Emory, VA 24327-0947
276.944.6143
jlang@ehc.edu