Festival Events

(Included in Scholars Conference Pass, LitPass, and VIP Pass)

Theater director and educator Tom Mitchell and members of the University of Illinois theater company present a staged reading that interweaves HNOC’s newly acquired letters by Tennessee Williams’s beloved and tragic sister, Rose, with diary entries by his mother and excerpts from his letters and his previously unpublished short story “God in the Free Ward.”

The reading is introduced by HNOC curator and historian Mark Cave and HNOC editor and conference codirector Margit Longbrake, who discuss HNOC’s acquisition of Rose’s letters, and by director Mitchell, who offers insight into his process of combining the texts from various sources.

(Included in Scholars Conference Pass, LitPass, and VIP Pass)

Seasoned director-scholars describe fragmented source texts and perspectives missing from the plays and their productions—and reframe those gaps as directorial opportunities.

Moderator: Mark Charney, Texas Tech University. Panelists: Lurana Donnels O’Malley, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Tom Mitchell, University of Illinois, Urbana, emeritus; John “Ray” Proctor, Tulane University.

(Included in Scholars Conference Pass, LitPass, and VIP Pass)

What does queerness in Williams’s texts have to do with 20th-century Tangier, the religion of early America, and a remarkable 21st-century Australian horror film? Join a panel of scholars from the US and Germany as they put a wide range of times, places, and forms in conversation.
Moderator: Annette J. Saddik, Graduate Center and City Tech, City University of New York. Panelists: Stephen Cedars, City University of New York; Benjamin Gillespie, City University of New York; Bess Rowen, Villanova University; Basil Wiesse, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

Admits you to all 4 sessions of the annual Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. This is the best deal if these are the only events you are attending.

You can also purchase these sessions individually for $10 each.

They are also included in the:

• VIP Pass
• LitPass – full weekend
• LitPass – Friday day pass

PRESENTED BY KILLER THEATER NEW ORLEANS 

Don your 1920s best for this interactive murder mystery event. Come with a group or solo, and we’ll make sure you’re on a team to help solve the murder. See Lolly le Fleur, “The Flower of the South,” fresh from airing her immortal voice to the stunned theatres of Europe. Her performance is certain to bring out all the leading lights of the city. We ask that guests refrain from committing murders during Ms. le Fleur’s performance, as the unique and pleasing tone of her voice, paired with the exotic jazz rhythms, has been known to arouse the ardent passions of the crowd. Witness this marvel as she graces her hometown with another earth-shattering night of excitement and thrills! It promises to be a night to remember. Cash bar available, plus prizes and giveaways!

While no one would argue that the entire city of New Orleans was a hotbed of the music that would come to be known as Jazz, there are specific streets and areas where the music flourished. West End, South Rampart Street, and the Tremé neighborhood are just a few areas of the city associated with the early years of Jazz. Panelists include Randy Fertel, John McCusker, and Fatima Shaik, who have each written about this topic in their various books. Moderated by Peggy Scott Laborde.

Join us for the premiere staged reading of the winning piece from our annual one-act play contest. Directed by David Hoover and performed by the Lakeview Players
Sponsored by Janet and Stanwood Duval. 

Alexis and the Sanity, a pop duo hailing from New Orleans, were formally christened in Spring 2023 when their debut single Hind Legs was released online. The band’s sound marries electronic samples, acoustic instruments, and the powerful soprano of frontwoman Alexis Marceaux. Members Marceaux and multi-instrumentalist Sam Craft began their previous incarnation Alexis & the Samurai in 2012 and their bilingual roots-meets-modern sextet Sweet Crude in 2013. Alexis & the Sanity live audiences can expect a mix of industrial grooves, haunting soundscapes, pop bangers, and moments of show-stopping acapella. The strength of Alexis and Sam’s successes (including appearances on NCIS, Tremé, and inclusion in numerous other TV shows and movies) have won the pair weekly residencies and invitations to large festival stages. Alexis & the Sanity’s debut LP Tongue Tied was released in February 2025.

Drummer & Smoke is made possible by a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

Layla Musselwhite is a New Orleans-based singer songwriter and slide guitarist who draws on a rich musical legacy via her father, blues legend Charlie Musselwhite. Layla grew up on the road steeped in the music of the greatest artists of our time including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Mama Thornton, and John Lee Hooker. While her music spans rhythm & blues, blues rock, folk, and soul, the touchstone is always the same—a deep understanding and respect for the early rhythms and melodies at the heart of the blues. Layla performs and records solo, duo, and with her full band of New Orleans heavyweights, The Cosmic Gentlemen. She’s recently graced stages at Jazz Fest, Big Sky Blues Fest, Crescent City Blues Festival, and the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise. Her 2023 album American Primitive is a collaboration with the New Orleans acoustic virtuoso Jimmy Robinson (Rolling Stone’s “Best of Fest” 2018.)

Drummer & Smoke is made possible by a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

The Slick Skillet Serenaders are a New Orleans-based band who bring a pre-WWII sensibility to their effervescent and enthusiastic shows, with vaudeville jokes and slapstick stage antics adding dimension to their repertoire of ragtime, traditional jazz, and blues. The band has a handful of albums out, including the 2019 Stagger Straight, with the rollicking “Fourth Street Mess Around” and an energetic take on the early blues classic “What’s the Matter With Your Mill?” They have a great love and appreciation for the music of the 20’s and 30’s and the showmanship with which they were performed.

Drummer & Smoke is made possible by a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

During this discussion, New Orleans fiction writers C. Morgan Babst, Alex Jennings, and E.M. Tran join moderator Megan Holt to explore the concept of the New Orleans novel. The panel will delve into how the culture of New Orleans—its musical traditions, diverse communities, and complex history—shapes the narratives of novels set here. It will also highlight the ever-changing idea of what a “New Orleans novel” is and how this idea has evolved in the first 25 years of the 21st century.

No matter what stage you may be in with your writing, it’s important to learn about the publishing process. And typically the first person you’ll encounter on the road to getting published is a literary agent. Katherine Fausset, a Senior Agent and Vice President at Curtis Brown, Ltd., will share her tips and advice on what you can do to improve your chances of signing with an agent before you even start the querying process; how to find an agent who’s right for you; what to include in the all-important query letter; and what the writer-agent relationship looks like and how to make the most of it. This is a chance to ask an agent anything—whether it’s about a specific question about the querying process or a general one about the publishing industry—so please feel free to come with questions.

Writers are always asked, where do you get your ideas from? But maybe the better question is how we move from ideas to consistent writing, and to an active manuscript (whether building toward a story, novella, novel or script). This workshop will focus on specific techniques and strategies for getting past self-doubt and procrastination in the writing process. Bring a pen and notepad for brief in-workshop writing exercises.

This craft session examines the ways in which writers build stories out of things not there—missing people, lost dreams, misplaced memories, and narrative gaps, as well as various other specters, shadows, hallucinations and dark holes. Miles Harvey’s debut short story collection, The Registry of Forgotten Objects, probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. This session will be helpful for fiction and nonfiction writers, and will include some writing time.

Join Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Cunningham for an immersive, audience-involved workshop on the ways writers create dramatic scenes, often using outwardly undramatic exchanges and situations. Fiction comes most fully to life when its characters tell readers a little more than they’d consciously intended to. For this session, Cunningham will stage a spontaneous public conversation with a volunteer from the audience, and then discuss as a group the ways a fiction writer might have used the conversation’s content as the basis for a scene in a novel or short story—everything from offhand remarks to unconscious physical gestures. The choices a writer makes—even at the fundamental level of deciding on which details to include versus which to omit—can make a crucial difference in the tone and mood of a scene.  A fiction writer can, essentially, use the same fundamental material to write a scene that will play as comic, or ominous, or whatever other mood contributes to the writer’s more general intentions.

Usually, as writers, we really want to build up to that big important part of a poem, but what’s really interesting is what happens AFTER that. Usually when people think of endings, they think of silence, a completely closed, shut-off  ending. But there’s so much power in what happens after we’ve said what we think we need to say. In this poetry craft session, we’ll talk about art, writing, memory, music, and how all of that can conjure memories, and how we can start writing about an event—but also what happens after that and the feelings that occur that can make our writing more powerful.

“The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays. Some of which are like firecrackers in a rope,” Williams wrote to director Elia Kazan in 1950. One-act plays were ever present in Tennessee Williams’s creative life. His first one-act won a prize at the University of Missouri when he was a freshman in 1930. His final one-act (considered to be his last play) is dated January 1983, a month before his death. He never stopped writing one-acts, and there are currently over 75 by Williams in print today. This year our tribute will take a look at short Williams plays from every decade—1930s through 1980s. To his college friends, he referred to his short plays as “fantasies.” Many of them are funny and take place in fairy, sci-fi, or otherwise mythic locations, including The Gnädiges Fräulein, The Case of the Crushed Petunias, The Chalky White Substance, Ten Blocks on The Camino Real and A Recluse and His Guest. Others share the poetry and grit of his most famous dramas, such as 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Mister Paradise, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow, and Green Eyes. You’ll hear excerpts from the familiar, as well as some hidden gems. The event is curated by Festival Director Paul J. Willis and Williams editor Thomas Keith (who also hosts).

Readers this year will include Festival luminaries Maureen Corrigan, Michael Cunningham, Jewelle Gomez,  Joan Larkin, Tim Murray, John “Ray” Proctor, and Mink Stole.

The annual Tribute Reading is presented by a grant from the New Orleans Theatre Association (NOTA).

Hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar at 6:30 PM; Performance at 7:30 PM.

Stories come to us from many sources, the most common being from memory, a conversation, or an image. The opening pages of Chin-Sun Lee’s debut novel Upcountry were initially inspired by a singular image: a drained and decayed swimming pool enclosed by a chain-link fence. In this workshop, we’ll focus on the ways that images can provoke associations that in turn, become compelling narrative. We’ll spend the first half of the workshop reading and discussing some examples of potent imagery and description. Then we’ll have a writing session based on an image—provided by Chin-Sun or participants can use any of their own—with sharing (for those inclined) and brief critiques to follow afterward.

Once upon a time--but when?! And they all lived happily ever--never! The fairy tale, that most venerated form among all fantastical narratives, has been with us from the start, though in truth fairy tales are far more than just bedtime stories for children, fodder for Disney adaptations, or bleak German cautionary tales with unaccountably violent endings. Fairy tales transport us to wondrous realms with a twisted logic all their own. They’re scary, and oddball, and achingly human. Not to mention the fact that they provide us with a unique and valuable framework through which to observe the complexities of our own modern world in all its absurdity, its heartbreak, and its horror. Through group discussion, targeted writing prompts, and examining excerpts from some of the original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (and sure, maybe one by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth), as well as the fiction of Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Victor LaValle, Brian Evenson, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, among others, this craft session with story writer and novelist Adrian Van Young (adrianvanyoung.com) will focus on revisiting, adapting and incorporating fairy tales and their archetypes to suit a modern adult readership. Spread your dragon’s wings and soar! 

The success of the ongoing horror television series based on Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has created renewed interest in Rice’s bestselling 1976 debut novel. Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941, spent most of her childhood and teenage years here, and returned to the city in her late 40s, leaving again in 2005. Upon her death in 2021 at the age of 80, Rice was returned to her beloved New Orleans and interred in Metairie Cemetery. Led by southern literary scholar Gary Richards, the 2025 breakfast book club will return to this iconographic work within the canon of vampire literature to explore its New Orleans setting and to meditate on its savvy, provocative use of vampirism as an extended metaphor for sexual otherness. Readers are invited to purchase and/or read the standard paperback version (ISBN 978-0345337665).  

Presented by the Diana Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction

What does it take to invent a female protagonist who will compel readers’ attention? For some, it’s a quirky personality, a fierce sense of independence, or an ongoing personal struggle of her own. For others, it’s finding a place in the world or developing a sense of community or family. And in crime fiction, characters need to have a bit of a dark side. Whether you’re beginning a series or writing a standalone novel, your female protagonist must be unique, memorable, and tough. Panelists discussing female protagonists include authors Trudy Nan Boyce, Margot Douaihy, and Ashley Elston, with New Orleans writer Greg Herren moderating.

Presented by the Diana Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction

All crime writing—true crime or fiction—explores right and wrong and the many layers of ambiguity in between. Social issues are often paramount in crime writing. Emma Copley Eisenberg shows how a single crime ripples throughout a community in her true crime bestseller, The Third Rainbow Girl. C.S. Harris explores the social issues of Regency England in her long running Sebastian St. Cyr series. Angie Kim explores medical ethics in her debut novel. And Marcie Rendon, in her Cash Blackbear series, illuminates the issues facing contemporary Native Americans. Moderated by J.M. Redmann, creator of the Micky Knight series.  

Presented by the Diana Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction

Readers are often loyal to settings in their favorite series. Think of Nevada Barr’s state parks, Louise Penny’s village of Three Pines, or Laura Lippman’s Baltimore. This panel includes four novelists who will take us to turf they have made their own—Christine Carbo draws us to the chilly world of Glacier National Park; Gwen Florio writes about the wilds of Montana; Adrianne Harun has taken us to Highway 16—the Highway of Tears— in British Columbia; and Sascha Rothchild takes us to the sunny beaches of Miami. They will discuss how to select a meaningful setting and bring it to life. Moderated by New Orleans writer Michael Allen Zell.

To journey back in time is to encounter new sights, new smells, a new language—even if your time machine takes you no farther, geographically, than your own front door. Three historical novelists will discuss the preparations necessary to take such a voyage: each has written a novel about exile, from home and from fate. In Allison Alsup’s Foreign Seed, an American diplomat investigates the disappearance of explorer Frank Meyer on the Yangtze River in 1918. Yuri Herrera writes the first full account of Benito Juarez’s 1853 exile in New Orleans in Season of the Swamp. And in The Titanic Survivors Book Club, Timothy Schaffert takes readers to a bookstore in 1912 Paris, where an apprentice librarian of the White Star Line joins up with others who missed the ill-fated boat—and saved their lives. Moderated by New Orleans novelist C. Morgan Babst, author of The Floating World. 

What is memoir but a report from the center of the self? Free of restraints and determined to exist. A letter to a past self and a consideration of a future self. The memoir writers on this panel represent a variety of selves, born from distinct experiences. Larry Bagneris is the author of Call Me Larry, A Creole Man’s Triumph over Racism, his story of growing up gay in New Orleans in the 1950s and political activism in Texas, where he founded Houston Pride Parade, then returning to his hometown. Pretty is the memoir of KB Brookins, a Black Trans writer, who offers a vibrant portrait of queerness, masculinity, and race. Combat veteran J.T. Blatty writes about her photography and oral history project, documenting the lives of Ukrainians in the Donbas region in Snapshots Sent Home. The author of numerous novels, Bernice L. McFadden delves into memoir with First Born Girls, her family history that traces the entwined generations of mothers and daughters. The panel is moderated by Constance Adler, author of the memoir My Bayou, New Orleans Through the Eyes of a Lover and a debut novel Sight Unseen.

From Homer’s Odyssey to Walcott’s Omeros, poets have always been captivated by questions of place, memory, and belonging: how rootedness creates commitments and allegiances, and how both our sense of place and our sense of ourselves shift over time. Exploring this theme in powerful new collections are four New Orleans-based poets: Benjamin Morris (The Singing River, Belle Point Press), M.A. Nicholson (Around the Gate, The Word Works), Peter Cooley (Accounting for the Dark, Carnegie Mellon), and Andy Young (Museum of the Soon to Depart, Carnegie Mellon). Join us for a stirring conversation moderated by Dr. Stacey Balkun (Sweetbitter, Sundress Publications) about who, what, and why we call things home.

“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.”—Dorothy Allison, Skin, Firebrand Books, 1994.

Dorothy Allison was a queer icon for decades and also one of our community’s brightest lights and strongest voices. Dorothy stood as a beacon of hope and wisdom, which she shared with the world in her writing. Raised as a bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy fiercely fought against stigma and shame, and fought for the underprivileged. Her work brilliantly explored the connections and intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She was also a long time supporter and friend of Saints & Sinners, was in our first Hall of Fame class of Literary Saints, and participated whenever she was able. It’s almost impossible to imagine Saints and Sinners without Dorothy. She was also a favorite TWFest speaker, loved for her honesty, quick humor, and solid advice for aspiring writers. We hope you will join us for this tribute reading for a lesbian literary legend.

Hosted by Jewelle Gomez, with additional readings by Pat Brady, Greg Herren, Thomas Keith, Susan Larson, and Elisabeth Nonas.

From Anne Rice’s haunted, gothic mansions to Fitzgerald’s desolate valley of ashes, the setting of a story can be just as iconic and vibrant as the characters in it. In the hands of a savvy writer, the setting of a story should take on a life of its own, one that not only immerses readers in the world but that also adds to the ambience and increases the conflict. Join C.H. Hooks (author of Can’t Shake the Dust, exploring the Southern backroads), Ery Shin (author of Spring on the Peninsula, a poignant meditation on modern life in Seoul), and Adrian Van Young (author of the Midnight Self, which transports the reader from harrowing outerspace to twisting labyrinths) as they reveal the key to building grounded worlds and lively locations. In this discussion, suitable for aspiring and experienced writers alike, we’ll dig deep into the craft of setting, finding fresh insights as well as strategies for getting the most out of this essential narrative tool. Moderated by Allison Alsup, author of Foreign Seed. 

Andy Young’s new poetry collection Museum of the Soon To Depart has a cover photograph by Josephine Sacabo. Both Carolyn Hembree’s new poetry collection For Today and Constance Adler’s new novel Sight Unseen have cover photographs by Jennifer Shaw, and the protagonist of Adler’s novel is a photographer. Jennifer Shaw has been working with Josephine Sacabo in her studio for several years, and both of these fine art photographers have distinct literary impulses. Shaw has used fairy tales and other works of literature for inspiration, and Sacabo cites poets as her most important influences. These five New Orleans artists will discuss the relationship between the literary and photographic arts. Moderated by New Orleans writer George Bishop, Jr.

Kalamu ya Salaam is one of New Orleans’ most prolific writers and activists, as well as a venerated retired teacher. He is the author of five books of poetry, over a dozen plays, numerous essays, as well as documentaries. He is known for his work with the independent writing program, Students at the Center, as well as founding BLACKARTSOUTH in 1968, a community writing and acting workshop for Black poets and playwrights. He also founded the NOMMO Literary Society, a New Orleans-based Black writers’ workshop whose work led to the creation of Runagate Press, which is still published in partnership with the University of New Orleans Press. A great lover of music, ya Salaam’s latest work is a debut novel, Walkin’ Blues, a speculation and meditation on the life and legend of bluesman Robert Johnson.

He is joined in conversation by TBD

Short stories pack a punch, distilling emotion, conflict, and revelation into just a few pages. What draws writers to this compact yet powerful form? These four authors discuss their approaches to crafting compelling short fiction, from honing voice and structure to balancing restraint and discovery. Whether exploring fleeting moments or life-altering events, their stories prove that brevity can be just as immersive as longer works. Panelists include Miles Harvey, Kate Segriff, and Julia Ridley Smith, with Rayna Nielsen moderating.

“Six days and seven nights came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.” So goes the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, often described as the most ancient surviving work of narrative literature. Weather, in short, has always been central to the stories we tell ourselves. But what new challenges—and opportunities—do writers face in the age of global warming? This panel looks at how writers of various genres are responding to climate change, including poet Jack B. Bedell, whose poetry frequently pays tribute to the people, landscapes, and traditions of South Louisiana; Miles Harvey, whose debut short fiction collection includes dystopian and drought-stricken settings; writer/director/playwright Mari Kornhauser, whose current projects are cli-fi speculative fiction; and journalist and nature critic Boyce Upholt, whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the natural world. The panel will be moderated by David Johnson.

Presented by the Diana Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction

We read crime fiction for many reasons—to find a sense of order in a chaotic world, to maintain a relationship with a beloved protagonist or revisit a fascinating setting—but we also turn to it for deep human truths, and some of the most interesting crime novels are written by and for women. We see the savagery of teenage girls, the anger of frustrated housewives or abused women, and plain old bad girls—as well as the inventiveness of victims, perpetrators, and truth tellers in these novels. Stilettos, anyone? Maureen Corrigan, the distinguished book critic for Fresh Air and the Washington Post, moderates a discussion with bestselling authors Megan Abbott, Alafair Burke, Gillian Flynn, and Laura Lippman, all previous winners of the Diana Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction, about the feminine and feminist aspects of crime writing.

Tennessee 101 is a fast-paced, fun, and informative introduction to Tennessee Williams! It’s focused on Williams’ unique relationship to New Orleans, as well as the various bits of trivia and lore relating to the theatre offerings at the Festival this year. Whether you’re new to the world of Williams or a long-time fan, come prepared to learn something. Presented by Augustin J Correro, Co-Artistic Director of The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans. There’s a Q&A session at the end, and be sure to get your copy of Tennessee Williams 101 for a brief signing to follow.

For the first time in forty years there are new volumes of short stories by Tennessee Williams, both edited by theater director and scholar Tom Mitchell. Early Stories by Tennessee Williams from the University of Iowa Press contains twenty-nine previously unpublished tales of the Midwest where Williams lived for twenty-two years. Written between 1932 and 1940, they created a collective portrait of a young artist finding his voice in the midst of the Great Depression. Not only did Williams infuse these stories with the people, places, and events of that turbulent time in America, they reveal so much about his unquenchable drive to experiment with style, subject, dialect, voice, and point of view. As playwright and director Moisés Kaufman has said about these stories, Williams was “searching for his own form of eloquence.”  In addition to Mitchell, panelists include theater scholar Bess Rowen and editor and scholar Thomas Keith. Annette J. Saddik will moderate.

Sponsored by Helen and George Ingram.

The writing and people who influenced Tennessee Williams are not always obvious. This year four Williams scholars will take a look at three distinct, often discreet, kinds of influence. Prof. Benjamin Gillespie, Baruch  College – City University of New York, will examine the impact of  playwright Eugene O’Neill; Margit Longbrake, Managing Editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, will investigate where Shakespeare’s influence appears in Williams’s work; and David Kaplan, Curator, The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, takes a look at the surprising amount of influence the early sci-fi/fantasy magazine Weird Tales had on Williams. Thomas Keith will moderate the discussion.

Sponsored by Helen and George Ingram.

How do you turn authentic experiences into universally relatable stories? This panel takes the voices of journalists, memoirists, and novelists and explores how they use personal stories as a vessel to carry larger, societal themes. They’ll discuss the craft of the personal essay, how essay writing differs from other forms of nonfiction, and how they’ve used the form to turn true stories into works that engage and inspire readers. Maegan Poland will moderate the discussion. Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years and is the author of My Life as a Villainess, a collection of essays exploring motherhood, family, and friendship. Kirsten Reneau is the author of Sensitive Creatures, a memoir in essays that explores trauma through the lens of the natural world. Desiree Richter is the author of The Presence of Absence, a collection about parenting, leaving fundamentalism, and living with loss. Julia Ridley Smith is the author of The Sum of Trifles, a memoir about grief and losing one’s parents. 

Join Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele, authors of Secrets of Romani Fortune Telling, alongside Ylva Mara Radziszewski, author of A Practical Guide for Witches and co-author of The Living Altar Oracle Deck with Kiki Robinson, for an enlightening exploration of Romani art and culture’s influence on contemporary literature, art, and new age spirituality. This panel will recontextualize harmful tropes that overshadow Romani contributions to modern culture, with a focus on post modern spiritual practices, while highlighting invisibilized obstacles faced by minorities within creative industries.We will examine the connections between popular fortune-telling methods—tarot, palmistry, and tea leaf reading—and their origins within the Romani diaspora. Additionally, we will highlight the often-overlooked contributions of the Romani people—commonly misidentified by the derogatory term “Gypsies”—to popular culture. Having faced centuries of persecution within their diaspora from India, the Romani developed various survival trades, including fortune telling, performance art, handicraft, and storytelling which helped preserve their cultural identity. This panel discussion will address how Romani traditions have shaped widely recognized divination practices, whose origins are frequently obscured in mainstream narratives. We will also explore the representation and misrepresentation of Romani culture in popular media, challenging stereotypes that contribute to misunderstandings about the Romani people.

Have you ever had a character live their lives in everyday spaces—the office, the grocery store, their house, the car—and feel that what you are writing is simply pushing your character through the tedious motions of life? In some ways, fiction is poignant because it can reflect reality and open vistas of understanding through realistic perspectives. But isn’t reality also weird? Sometimes the best way to invigorate a scene is to do just that: make it weird. In this session, we will discuss ways to inject the uncanny and absurd into our writing, how to notice and compile the strangeness we see in our daily lives, and exercises we can do if we feel our stories are stuck in the mundane world.

Adaptation is about love: Love of content. Love of craft. Love of genre. Come by and we’ll take some time to be wildly in love with language. Adaptation can help us take the things we love and explore them with a newfound intimacy. It can help beginners hone their craft and help unestablished writers sell their work. It can help experienced writers connect with new methodologies and help anyone explore a new genre. It’s a great way to start writing and a great way to grow as a writer. Adaptations can let us come back to ourselves and our craft from a new perspective. We’ll ask a lot of bonding questions: Why adapt something from one genre to another? How do we pick what to adapt? What is source material to us, and why do we want to work with it? How do we pick what genre to adapt source material into? We’ll spend time with the slippery-yet-empowering transition when the adaptation becomes our own artwork!

Festival President Mister Gregory invites you to join him and long-time TWFest favorites, Delta Revues for an old fashioned Shrimp Boil and roots music experience. An intimate dinner party awaits at our shrimp shack (actually the faded front parlor of an 1820s Creole Cottage). Tastings of local blue crab, fresh black drum from Lake Pontchartrain, and crawfish will tempt your tastebuds before a big pile of wild-caught Louisiana gulf shrimp hit the table. A little storytelling, a lot of music, and a light dessert, all wrapping up just in time to enjoy a stroll back to the Hotel Monteleone for the opening night show.

A Romani dinner with music and entertainment.