UE LitFest

The annual UE LitFest gives undergraduates the opportunity to present creative and critical papers to audiences made up of their peers, their professors, and the members of the local literary community. Students also have the opportunity to win awards for their writing.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING

Melvin M. Peterson Literary Forum
Hemminger-Brown Lecture

Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien

Friday, April 17, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
Shanklin Theatre, Ridgway Building

Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien is the first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews. Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others―not to mention countless exchanges with Tim O'Brien himself― Peace Is a Shy Thing provides a nearly day-by-day, gripping account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process. Peace Is a Shy Thing is as much a history of the era as it is a story of O'Brien's life, from his small-town midwestern mid-century childhood, to winning the National Book Award and his status as literary elder statesman. A story which Vernon, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and a literary scholar trained by officers and professors of the Vietnam era, is uniquely suited to tell.

Senior Coffee Hour Reading

Thursday, April 10, 2025
4:00 p.m.
Rooms 162, Harkness Hall
Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building

13th Annual Literary Conference

Saturday, April 12, 2025
Student Panels at 9:30 a.m., 10:45 a.m., and Noon.
Rooms 271, 272, and 273, Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building
Attendance is FREE and open to the public.

The 2025 conference officially began on the evening of Thursday, April 10 with the Senior Coffee Hour Reading. This event was followed on Friday by the Hemminger-Brown lecture at the Melvin M. Peterson Literary Forum. Dr. Liam, Associate Professor of British and European literature at the Governors State University, Chicago, gave a lecture titled “Keeping things out of proportion: Scale and hope in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin.” The conference continued on the Saturday morning with a series of student panels. View the complete schedule.

At the end of the conference, the Department of English and Creative Writing presented its 2025 awards:

GRABILL AWARDS

CREATIVE NONFICTION

First Place: Olivia Oswald for “The Things You Left Behind”
First Place: Sam Fowler for “The Zero Stars Bars”

FICTION

Third Place: Sam Fowler for “Janie Carlyle’s Foolproof Plan for Starting a Cult”
Second Place: Olivia Oswald for “The Lakefront”
First Place: Grace Burnell for “The River and the Road”

POETRY

Third Place: Ariana Barker for “The Storm Will Pass”
Second Place: Kalea Reeves for “A Ghazal for a Rainy Day”
First Place: Zorah Mehrzad for “approx. 1.618”

ACADEMIC WRITING

Third Place: Sam Tarter for “Communication and Storytelling as Therapy in Spiegelman’s Maus”
Second Place: Collin Wilson for “Romantic Visions and Through Lines into Modernism”
First Place: Isabelle Koch for “Gawain is Dust and to Dust He Shall Return”