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

Keeping things out of the proportion: Scale and hope in the works of Ursula K Le Guin

Friday, April 11, 2025, 7:00 p.m.
Room 162, Harkness Hall
Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building

Liam Lanigan, PhD

Liam Lanigan is Associate Professor of British and European literature at Governors State University, Chicago. He received his PhD from University College Dublin and is a former Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork, and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. He is the Vice President of the Association for Literary Urban Studies, and Secretary of the MLA Irish Language and Literature Forum. Lanigan is the author of James Joyce, Urban Planning, and Irish Modernism: Dublins of the Future (Palgrave 2014), as well as co-editor of the forthcoming edited collection Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance: Cities Under Stress (Palgrave 2025). He has written extensively on the city, globalization, finance, and migrancy in contemporary Irish and British literature, including for journals such as Modern Language Quarterly and Irish University Review.

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”