"Please join us Saturday, May 14th at Clark College in Vancouver, WA in the Penguin Union Building for a day of creative writing workshops and readings. Free and open to the public. Lunch served. Workshop leaders include Pulitzer Prize finalists, Oregon Book Award winners, Clark English faculty, and more! The workshop runs from 10am to 6pm but attendees are welcome to come and go as they please. An amazing opportunity for the community to connect and learn from published authors and Clark professors in an intimate setting!

One visiting writer of particular interest is Kesha Ajose-Fisher. A Clark College alumna, Kesha's very first publication was in The Phoenix, Clark's student-run arts and literary journal; in fact, her work won the magazine's Editor's Choice Award in both 2011 & 2012. Kesha went on to publish the short story collection No God Like the Mother, which won the Oregon Book Awards' Ken Kesey Award for Fiction in 2020.

There will be several other Oregon Book Award winners offering workshops at the festival as well, including Sierra Crane Murdoch, Emily Kendal Frey, and Allison Cobb. Events will begin at 10, with the former Clark County Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Morgan welcoming attendees and touching on the theme of the day, which is "Writing as Community Practice." Four different workshop sessions will follow, with a lunch break in the middle featuring free sack lunches along with lunchtime readings by featured visiting writers. The entire event is free and open to the public. 

After two years of essentially no on-campus programming due to the pandemic, we're so excited to welcome the community back to Clark for this full-day creative writing event. It revives a similar event that ran at the college for several years over a decade ago. We hope this year's festival will be the first of many--and a renewal in more than one way." (Promo Copy)