LEH and Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Fest Offer Teacher Scholarships

Calling all Louisiana educators!

Attend Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival (March 27-29, 2015) for featured master classes or literary panels with authors such as John Waters, General Russel Honoré, Phil Klay, and many others!

The Festival is offering free scholarship weekend panel passes, which allows access to 25 panels ($75 value), plus a Master Class ticket ($25 value) to Louisiana educators. Discounts are available on theater and special event tickets. The offer also includes a $100 travel stipend for each teacher to travel to New Orleans.

The 2014 scholarships provide educators a professional development opportunity at one of the nation’s leading literary festivals. Meet and learn from nationally renowned writers and join the discussion on Louisiana’s literary history.

Listed below is a small sampling of the discussions taking place during the Festival. Full program is available on www.tennesseewilliams.net. Sign up to the Festival’s email list for updates.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Deceptive Histories, Truthful Fictions

Lalami Lalami’s The Moor’s Account follows conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez’s 1527 expedition to the New World. She will discuss history as narrative force, her re-creation of the multilingual voices of the past, and the points at which facts turn into fiction.

Sweet and Savage: Writing the Women of the South

In this region of sweet tea and magnolias, lynching and the Klan, female characters have long had to be less than genteel, perhaps at times even savage, in order to live their lives and protect those around them, as we see depicted in the works of the writers on this panel.

Louisiana Witness: Homegrown Narratives

Writers, born of the region’s native locales, render and evoke the South, narrative perspective informs the stories that we receive and read. Panelists discuss how their characters bear witness to an ever-changing Southern social and cultural climate, changing views of histories, and how these views inform the overall works.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Crafting Memoirs: Ourselves and Others

Memoir=You writing about you. Outside of the personal sphere, a writer’s own perspective is set against larger realities–gender, race, sexuality, and nationality. Bring your own for the Q&A.

Mayhem, Malice and Murder

From Agatha Christie to James M. Cain to Raymond Chandler to Sara Paretsky, the mystery genre has produced iconic characters and stories that have become part of the popular culture. Join four diverse crime writers as they discuss the form, function, and fascination of writing—and reading—about crime: where it happens, how it happens, who does it, and why. 

The Transnationalists: American Writers on Border Crossings

From Faulkner on to the many hyphenated, diasporic writers, the U.S. literary landscape has always been a transnational space–America on excursion into the world and the world coming in. In this panel of consummate border crossers, authors will discuss being an American writer in the world today, at home and abroad.