The Emerging Writers Festival (EWF), a longstanding tradition hosted by F&M’s English department, started on Wednesday, April 2, and continues until Friday, April 4. Every spring, the festival invites five emerging writers to campus to share their work at readings, teach writing techniques at craft talks, and engage with the campus community at fun events. All festival events are open to students, staff, and Lancaster locals.
This year, the festival will feature published authors Katie Moulton, Kelan Nee, Jamila Osman, Leslie Sainz, and Lauren K. Watel, whose works span creative nonfiction, poetry, essay writing, and more. Learn more about each of them below:
- Katie Moulton is the author of the audio memoir Dead Dad Club: On Grief and Tom Petty (Audible 2022). Her essays, stories, and music criticism appear in The Believer, New England Review, Oxford American, Ninth Letter, Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, VCCA-France, and other organizations. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA.
- Kelan Nee is a carpenter and poet from Massachusetts. His debut collection, Felling, was released in May 2024 and won the 2023 Vassar Miller Prize. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Yale Review, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Houston where he is a PhD candidate in critical poetics and the Editor of Gulf Coast.
- Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, educator, and community organizer based in Portland, Oregon. She has taught creative writing from Portland to Palestine and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She received the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the 2021 Black Warrior Review‘s Flash contest, and The Bellingham Review‘s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, Djerassi, Caldera, and Nawat Fes. Some of her writings can be found in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Al Jazeera, Catapult, Diagram, and in several anthologies.
- Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), winner of the 2024 Audre Lorde Award, and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the New England Book Award, and the Vermont Book Award. The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships, scholarships, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, the Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. A former guest host of the award-winning podcast The Slowdown, she currently works as the managing editor of New England Review and teaches in the Newport MFA program at Salve Regina University.
- Lauren K Watel’s debut book, a collection of prose poetry entitled BOOK of POTIONS (potion = poem + fiction), was awarded the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry from Sarabande Books, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and translations have appeared widely. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA, home of the intrepid Decatur High School Marching Band.
EWF is an event rooted in community, even before the excitement of the festival begins. A group of English students and faculty form a planning committee and work throughout the spring semester to organize all aspects of the festival. Within this committee, they work in multiple subcommittees on decorations, social media and marketing, event planning, and more.
“It’s a great way to connect to the other amazing English seniors and learn from a very talented group of writers,” says Emily Hanson, a student committee member. Other members include Harmony Clark, Olivia Clay, Kezmond Elliot, Miles Montalvo, Ally Morrow, Tech Oh, Hima Ramnarine, Tyra Smith, and Carolyn South. Each member “shadows” an author, welcoming them to campus and serving as a guide for them during their time at F&M.
As the festival commences, readings and craft talks provide the opportunity for students to learn firsthand from consummate professionals and connect with other students with a shared passion for writing and creative expression. The festival concludes with a farewell barbeque at the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House–open to campus and the Lancaster community. Attendees can socialize with the visiting writers, professors, and other students over a hamburger and a game of ping pong.
Interested in attending? Here is the Emerging Writers Festival website, where you can find the festival schedule, Zoom links to all events, and more information about the emerging writers.
Senior Harmony Clark is a Contributing Writer. Her email is hclark@fandm.edu.