Department of English

The Florida Writers Festival will feature Donald Antrim, Devin Johnston, Yiyun Li, and Ada Limón. The authors will read from their works and hold informal talks. All events will take place in the Ustler Hall Atrium and the Bull. The festival is free and open to the public.

The festival, which is in its 70^th year, is presented by the 2020 class of MFA@FLA, the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English, University of Florida and sponsored by The Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research. It is made possible by generous donations from Terry and Dorothy Smiljanich and the Office of the Provost of the University of Florida.

For further information please contact August Lah (alah@ufl.edu). For general MFA@FLA program information see www.english.ufl.edu/crw/.

SCHEDULE OF FLORIDA WRITERS FESTIVAL EVENTS:

ADA LIMÓN & DONALD ANTRIM

Readings 8 p.m., Friday, October 25th

Ustler Hall Atrium

ADA LIMÓN, DONALD ANTRIM, DEVIN JOHNSTON, & YIYUN LI

Craft Talks 1 p.m., Saturday, October 26th

The Bull

YIYUN LI & DEVIN JOHNSTON

Readings 8 p.m., Saturday, October 26th

Ustler Hall Atrium

Donald Antrim is the author of the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, as well as a memoir, The Afterlife. Most recently, he wrote a collection of stories titled The Emerald Light in the Air (FSG, 2014). He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and an associate professor in the writing program at Columbia University. He is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow.

Born in 1970, Devin Johnston spent his childhood in North Carolina. He is the author of five previous books of poetry and two books of prose, including Creaturely and Other Essays. He works for Flood Editions, an independent publishing house, and teaches at Saint Louis University in Missouri. His most recent work is a book of poetry, Mosses and Lichens (FSG, 2019).

Yiyun Li is the author of five works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, Gold Boy, Emerald Girland Where Reason Ends—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband.

Ada Limónis the author of, most recently, The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. Her previous collections include Sharks in the Rivers, Lucky Wreck, and This Big Fake World. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She serves on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.