Anne Lamott among first round of authors announced for 2018 Get Lit festival
Get Lit is months away, April 23-29. But organizers are already getting the word out about high-profile visiting authors set to attend.
The highest profile belongs to Anne Lamott, the beloved novelist and essayist behind such books as “Bird by Bird” and “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.” Her latest book, “Hallelujah Anyway: Recovering Mercy,” was released in April.
A frequent visitor to the New York Times best-sellers list, the California writer often mines her own life and faith for her books. In an April article, the Washington Post referred to her as a “Christian author and patron saint of writers everywhere.”
She’s active on social media, too, having amassed nearly 500,000 followers on Facebook and 170,000 on Twitter. She doesn’t shy from controversy at all. When Twitter gets angry, Lamott doesn’t back down. In that same Washington Post article, she said, “I love to block people who are rude and awful, and I’m sure Jesus would be blocking everybody like crazy, too, if he was around.”
Her talk is being co-sponsored by the English department at Eastern Washington University. Lamott will read on April 28 at the Bing Crosby Theater.
Lamott’s appearance was announced on social media early last week. The festival on Friday announced appearances by six other authors.
“And this is just our first round of announcements, we have tons of other great authors coming and will make more announcements as we continue to contract with them,” said festival executive director Kate Peterson.
Bryant Terry will appear on April 24 at the Lair Auditorium at Spokane Community College. Terry is a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award-winning chef, educator and author, and is the chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. His fourth book, “Afro Vegan,” was released in 2014 and was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award.
Maggie Smith and Brit Bennett will talk on April 27 at 7 p.m. at the Bing, and both will be running writing workshops on April 28.
Smith is an Ohio poet whose latest collection, “Good Bones,” was released on Oct. 1. If the title “Good Bones” sounds familiar, that’s because her poem of that name went viral in 2016. It begins, “Life is short, though I keep this from my children,” and was published in the journal Waxwings three days after a gunman killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. A Washington Post article on the poem from December called it a “heartfelt work that grapples with pain and injustice, with unfairness and disillusionment.”
Bennett’s a name that might be familiar as well. Her debut novel, “The Mothers,” is reportedly being made into a movie being produced by Kerry Washington of “Scandal” fame. The book was released with a splash last fall, with The Guardian proclaiming Bennett “a bold new voice in American fiction” and the New York Times calling it “ferociously moving.”
Lilliam Rivera, author of the young adult novel “The Education of Margot Sánchez,” will speak April 28 at the Montvale Events Center in a talk co-sponsored by Secondary English Education at EWU. Rivera is a 2016 Pushcart Prize winner whose work has appeared in Tin House, Tahoma Literary Review, Los Angeles Times, Latina, USA Today, Sundog Lit, Bellevue Literary Review and TheRumpus.net.
Nathaniel Tarn and Josh MacIvor-Andersen will be reading on April 29. Tarn is a poet, essayist and anthropologist whose first poetry collection, “Old Savage/Young City” with Jonathan Cape, was released in 1964. McIvor Andersen teaches at Marquette University, writes nonfiction and is, according to his website, a competitive tree climber. The location of their ecologically themed event is still up in the air. Stay tuned for details.
Ticketing information also is still being worked out. We’ll have details about tickets and other festival authors when they become available. In the meantime, visit https://getlitfestival.org/ for more information.