Next week Northwestern University’s Annual Writer’s Festival commences. While writing workshops are open only to Northwestern students, author readings as well as a guided discussion by writers Brian Bouldrey, Rachel Webster, and Eula Biss are open to the public.
New to the Festival this year is author David Shields, whose controversial book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has been heralded by James Wood of The New Yorker as “highly- problematic” and “imprecise” and by Chuck Klosterman as what “might be the most intense, thought- accelerating book of the last 10 years”. Shields is also the author of New York Times Bestseller The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. In his most recent anthology The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death twenty writers were asked to address the concept of death. Publishers Weekly names the result “a collection of extraordinary essays […].”
The festival begins on Tuesday April 12th at 5:30pm with a reading by Nami Mun, author of Miles from Nowhere. Mun was named Best New Novelist by Chicago Magazine in 2009. All public events take place at the Hilton Orrington of Evanston, Illinois. Shields’ reading on April 14th at 5:30pm will conclude the festival. You can read more about the conference and its authors here.