Speakers and Workshops
We are excited to announce our featured presenters for the next festival (February 19-21, 2025).
Dana Gioia
Keynote Speaker
Dana Gioia s a celebrated poet and critic. Gioia (pronounced “joy-a”) has published five full-length collections of verse, most recently Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). His collection 99 poems won the Poets’ Prize as the best new book of the year.
Former California Poet Laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he is best known as a central figure in the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry. In addition to the American Book Award and Poets’ Prize, Gioia has won many awards including the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, Presidential Citizen’s Medal, Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and Walt Whitman Champion of Literacy prize. He has been awarded ten honorary doctorates. Critic William Oxley has called Dana, “probably the most exquisite poet writing in English today.” Gioia has written four opera libretti and collaborated with musicians in genres from classical to jazz. His most recent critical book is The Catholic Writer Today: and Other Essays (2019).
Katy Carl
Presenter and Fiction Workshop Leader
Katy Carl is imprint editor at Word of Fire Luminor and writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas—Houston, where she earned her MFA in creative writing. Author of As Earth Without Water, Fragile Objects, Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World, and Praying the Great O Antiphons, she is editor emeritus of Dappled Things magazine, on whose editorial board she has served since 2007, and a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. Her writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Evangelization & Culture, Public Discourse, Genealogies of Modernity, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, Windhover, Solum Literary Journal, Vita Poetica, Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, Exposition Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Sostenuto, and Church Life Journal, among others.
Daniel Bowman Jr.
Presenter and Nonfiction Workshop Leader
Daniel Bowman Jr is the author of A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country: Poems (VAC Chicago, 2012), the memoir On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, & the Gifts of Neurodiversity (Brazos, 2021), and the forthcoming graphic novel The Autism Journals (Oni Press). His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Books & Culture, The Midwest Quarterly, Rio Grande Review, Seneca Review, St. Katherine Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and other magazines.
He grew up in New York and lives in Indiana, where he is Associate Professor of English at Taylor University, Editor in Chief of Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and faculty advisor to Students for Education on Neurodiversity (SEND).
Lesley Clinton
Poetry Workshop Leader
Lesley Clinton is the author of the chapbook Calling the Garden from the Grave (2020), which placed 2nd among books of creative verse in the National Federation of Press Women Communications Contest. Clinton's poetry and critical essays have appeared in publications such as America, Dappled Things, Modern Age, Presence, THINK, Mezzo Cammin, Windhover, Christianity & Literature, Solum Journal, and Ekstasis Magazine.
In 2023 she became the poetry content editor for Paraclete Press. She has an MA in Teaching and is projected to receive an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of St. Thomas in May of 2025. A recipient of the Magis Award for Teaching Excellence, Clinton is English Department Chair at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory. She also serves as a board member of Catholic Literary Arts (CLA) and as Director of CLA’s High School Writers Institute.
Craft Feedback Workshops
Time TBD by genre-groups: limited to one-hour sessions
Want to receive feedback on a work-in-progress from other participants? This is your opportunity. We’ll group you with two others (in the same genre) who have chosen this option. A few weeks before the festival, we’ll put you in contact and you’ll trade work by the week prior to read and prepare. During the festival, breakout space is provided for workshopping.
Note: please limit fiction and nonfiction works to less than 4500 words unless your group elects otherwise.
Improvised Shakespeare Company
Improv Comedy Show and Improv Workshop leaders
Based on one audience suggestion (a title of a show that has never been written), The Improvised Shakespeare Company® creates a fully improvised Shakespearean masterpiece right before your eyes. Nothing has been planned out, rehearsed, or written. All of the dialogue is said for the first time, the characters are created as you watch, and if ever you're wondering where the story is going...so are they! You've never seen the Bard like this before!
Page last updated November 07, 2024