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: A Coversation about the Life and Art of Tim O’Brien

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

Alex Vernon, PhD, is from Prairie Village, Kansas. Alex Vernon graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only Literature major in his class of over a thousand), served in combat as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Peace Is a Shy Thing is his eleventh book.

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.

Senior Coffee Hour Reading

Thursday, April 16, 2026
4:00 p.m.
Room 75
Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building

14th Annual Literary Conference

Saturday, April 18, 2026
Student Panels at 9:30 a.m., 10:45 a.m., and Noon
Rooms 71, 73, and 75, Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building
Attendance is FREE and open to the public.

The 2026 conference officially began on the evening of Thursday, April 16 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. Alex Vernon, M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas spoke with UE’s Dr. Mark Cirino about Dr. Vernon’s recent biography of Tim O’Brien, “Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien.” 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 2026 awards:

GRABILL AWARDS

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Third Prize: Tie between Campbell Glaser for “Twins and Dogs” and Allison Gansman for “Emotional Labor”
Second Prize: Collin Wilson for “Symbols of Solitude”
First Prize: Kara Laymon for “Concrete Beer, Ladybug Cake and a Black Cat”

FICTION

Third Prize: Finnian Salyers for “Like Father Like Son"
Second Prize: Kara Laymon for “Orchids by my Bathtub”
First Prize: Ariana Barker for “Dune Beach”

POETRY

Third prize: Grace Ehrhard for “Hey God, It’s Death Again”
Second prize: Grace Gleisner for “The Girl Who Carried the Scale”
First prize: Grace Burnell for “Infested Slumber”

ACADEMIC WRITING

Third Prize: Grace Gleisner for “Livy’s Moral History of Rome: Classical Intentions and Modern Interpretations”
Second Prize: Alison Gansman for “The Educational Role of Critical Race Theory in Jeanne Dyches and Deani Thomas’s ‘Unsettling the “White Savior” Narrative: Reading Huck Finn through a Critical Race Theory/Critical Whiteness Studies Lens’”
First Prize: Emma Spaulding for “The Role of Social Justice in Wordsworth’s ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’”