The Carson McCullers Literary Festival is coming to Columbus, Georgia, February 21 and 22! This hometown birthday celebration of world-famous novelist Carson McCullers will feature a reading and book signing by NEA Big Read novelist Tayari Jones, as well as readings and book signings by former McCullers Center Writers in Residence Lauren Green, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Melissa Pritchard and Snowden Wright; a musical performance by singer-songwriter Aimee Bobruk; and a panel Q&A with all of the above. The celebration will conclude Saturday afternoon with the awards ceremony for the annual Carson McCullers Literary Awards. All events are on the Main Stage of the Riverside Theatre Complex and the Bo Bartlett Center, Corner of West 10th Street and Bay Avenue in Uptown Columbus, and are free and open to the public.
Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians is partnering with the Columbus Public Library to host the festival. Tayari Jones’s novel Silver Sparrow, set in an upper-middle-class African American neighborhood of Atlanta in the 1980s, is a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection, and copies will be available free for patrons of the library who attend preliminary events. Additional copies will be available to buy and have signed by the author at the reading on Friday, February 17.
The festival schedule includes the following:
Friday, February 21
4:30 p.m. – Samuel Kọ́láwọlé and Melissa Pritchard reading, Riverside Theatre
5:30 p.m. – Reception and book signing Riverside Theatre
6:30 p.m. – Tayari Jones appearance, book signing after, Riverside Theatre
8:30 p.m. – Concert by Aimee Bobruk, Bo Bartlett Center
Saturday, February 22
9:30 a.m. – Coffee reception, Riverside Theatre
10 a.m. – Authors panel Q&A, Riverside Theatre
11 a.m. – Lauren Green and Snowden Wright reading, Riverside Theatre
12:30 p.m. – Awards Ceremony, Carson McCullers Literary Awards, Riverside Theatre
New York Times bestselling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage. Published in 2018, An American Marriage is an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.
Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Aimee Bobruk spent 15 years in Austin, Texas, learning to write songs and perform until songs and love took her to the edge of the Baltic Sea where she now resides on an island in Denmark. In her own words, “I write to make sense of the world and my place in it.” Currently, Aimee is releasing her album Malybanchia inspired from her journey along the Mississippi River and residency at the childhood home of American author Carson McCullers. Alongside this release, she is launching an online global songwriting club for teens called Tuneagers. Leading up to this point, she has released three additional studio albums and has written over 25 songs with international artists and publishing companies. Her song “Black Swan” competed in Sweden’s 2015 Melodifestivalen in the renowned Eurovision Song Competition. In 2018, she made a documentary film “Borderlanders,” where she rode the Texas/Mexico border on a motorcycle and interviewed locals about life in this region. In October of 2024, she served as the artist in residence at Shenandoah National Park, writing songs inspired by nature and stories she encountered from park visitors.
Lauren Green holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and was one of Forbes‘ “30 under 30” in the 2024 media category. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, Glimmer Train (winner of the New Writer’s Award) and elsewhere. She is the author of A Great Dark House, which won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and the inaugural recipient of the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award, sponsored by Poetry Ireland and Stanford University. Her writing has received support from the Kenyon Review Workshop, Bread Loaf and the Carson McCullers Center. She lives in New York City.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, Image Journal and other literary publications. He has received numerous residencies and fellowships and has been a finalist for the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize and won an Editor-Writer Mentorship from the Word. He studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa; is a graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts; and earned his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. He has taught creative writing in Africa, Sweden and the United States, and currently teaches fiction writing as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Melissa Pritchard was born in San Mateo, California. She has published eight award-winning books of fiction, a biography and a collection of essays. Among other prizes, she has received the University of Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor Award, the University of Rochester’s Janet Heidinger Kafka Award, Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Prize. A five-time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and frequently shortlisted in Best American Short Stories, her fiction and essays appear in The Paris Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, Ecotone, LitMag, A Public Space, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Wilson Quarterly and other venues. WordTheatre has performed her short stories in New York and Los Angeles; two of her books were named New York Times “Editor’s Choice” and “Notable Books of the Year.” Others, receiving starred reviews from Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, have been named as O, The Oprah Magazine “Top Titles” and “Book of the Week,” and as “Best Book of the Year” by The San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Her essay collection, given a starred review by Library Journal, was included in Publishers Weekly “Top Ten in Essays, Literary Biography and Criticism” and praised by Lit Hub as a “Best Book about Books,” and by Poets and Writers as a “Best Book for Writers.”
Born and raised in Mississippi, Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month and NPR Best Book of the Year. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire and The Paris Review. Wright was a Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, and his small-press debut, Play Pretty Blues, received the Summer Literary Seminar’s Graywolf Prize. He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.
Visit the website, call (706) 565-1200 or email [email protected] for more information.
This post is sponsored by the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians.
