Literary Festival June 12

Back for the fourth year in a row, the South Arkansas Literary Festival brings together a lineup celebrating Arkansas stories, home-grown talent and the robust history of the region on June 12.

A collaboration among the SouthArk Library, the Union County Public Library and the Calhoun County Public Library, the festival also is being supported for the first time by a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Held online, the festival will kick off with the writing and publishing advice by Emily Roberson. Roberson has been a bookseller in Little Rock; a newspaper reporter in Vicksburg, Mississippi; a marketing manager in Boston; and a writer in Dallas as well as Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is the author of “Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters,” which tells the story of a teenager from a line of royals who are the biggest thing in entertainment.

Next up is Jay Jennings, a writer and editor whose work has appeared in many national newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Lowbrow Reader, Travel and Leisure and Oxford American. His most recent editing project is “Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany,” which collected the reporting, travel writing, short stories and drama by the El Dorado-born novelist best known for “True Grit.” The collection was named Book of the Year for 2012 by Books and Culture, and the New York Times Book Review called it “a thoughtfully-composed selection of published work spiced with rare and fresh material.”

The festival’s keynote address will be provided by David Hill. Originally from Hot Springs, Hill said that he was raised in a family of “carnies, gamblers, hell-raisers and storytellers.” His first book, “The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten Capital of Vice,” was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book for 2020 and has been optioned for a TV production.

El Dorado’s Moriah Hicks will present on storytelling through the spoken word. She co-wrote the award-winning play “Hip Hop Project: Insight to a Generation,” and performed at Louder than a Bomb where she was a featured spoken-word artist.

LaTonya Richardson, an instructor in the multimedia communications department at the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff, will discuss writing and publishing for young adults, including young adult romance.

The schedule will conclude with a presentation from photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House. Their book “Remote Access” is the culmination of a three-year effort to chronicle the libraries that serve Arkansas’ smallest communities, delving into issues of race, politics, gender and isolation. Schmidt’s work has appeared in National Geographic and the German edition of Rolling Stone. She won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council in 2018. House’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and in publications like Woman’s World and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of “Buffalo Creek Chronicles,” “Not a Good Sign” and the children’s book “Otto’s Great Adventure.”

More information, including how to register to attend the festival, is available at the SouthArk Library’s Facebook Page at fb.com/southarklibrary