SASFest

(Included with your Weekend Registration or your Saturday Day Pass!)

Finish out the Festival by joining us as we honor outstanding members of our literary community. Wrap up the weekend with old and new friends, and pass one more good time at the Saints and Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival. We’ll introduce the honorees of our 11th annual Saints and Sinners Emerging Writer Award generously sponsored by Rob Byrnes. This award acknowledges an exceptional debut work or an author establishing a body of work propelling them to the next stage of their literary career. We’ll also induct this year’s members into the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame given to individuals who share their passion for our literary community through various avenues, including writing, performing, promotion, publishing, editing, teaching, bookselling, and volunteerism. And we’ll hear from some of our 2025 Poetry Contest finalists read from their winning entries and have copies of our 2025 Saints and Sinners Poetry Contest Anthology available as a gift to everyone at the closing reception. 

(Included with your Weekend Registration or your Saturday Day Pass!)

Sponsored by the John Burton Harter Foundation

Join this year’s contest runner-up David Pratt “Our Finest Gifts,” along with finalists John Copenhaver, Lewis DeSimone, Alfred P. Doblin, Miah Jeffra, and Tom Semmes for an evening of cocktails and readings from the Saints and Sinners 2025: New Fiction from the Festival hosted by Co-editor Morgan Hufstader with comments from our finalist judge Greg Herren. Audience members receive a copy of the new anthology created from our 2025 Short Fiction Contest. 

(Included with your Weekend Registration or your Friday Day Pass!)

Come experience true Southern hospitality in the beautiful courtyard of the BK Historic House & Gardens. Mingle with fellow writers and avid readers as you begin your evening in the French Quarter at this historical landmark. We’ll have hors d’oeuvres, spirits, and a specialty cocktail to get you started. Melodic stylings of Tsarina Hellfire and Stanley Roy will add to the ambience, plus Tarot for Tips with readings by Moonbear Aguilar & Jacob Budenz.

Thank you to BK House for sponsoring and hosting our welcome party!

COLLAGE YOURSELF INTO A STORY

A lot of writers have difficulty finding their next story. Maybe you have an idea but not the characters, or conversely, the characters are haunting you, but you don’t know what to do with them. Participants in this workshop will find inspiration, tap into their intuition, and exercise their imaginations using simple SoulCollage® techniques combined with writing exercises. Absolutely no art experience is necessary, and all supplies will be provided. Please bring something to write with, your willingness to learn new techniques, and your enthusiasm to explore a new approach to an old problem. Penelope Starr is the author of the novel Desert Haven and The Radical Act of Community Storytelling: Empowering Voices in Uncensored Events. She is a certified SoulCollage® facilitator. Penelope often combines aspects of SoulCollage® techniques in her innovative writing and storytelling workshops.

EROTICA LAID BARE: PUTTING PASSION ON THE PAGE

Do you stumble and fumble when writing sex scenes? You’re not alone, but your characters don’t have to remain eternally chaste. Join erotica writer and editor Jerry L. Wheeler in some guided writing, where you’ll create a perfect seven-line paragraph of erotica using your senses. You’ll learn his method to writing engaging seduction or you’ll receive prompts to get you in the mood…to write. Bring your boldest creative self and something to write with and get ready to lose your inhibitions on the page. Jerry L. Wheeler is the editor of seven anthologies of gay erotica for Bold Strokes Books, Wilde City Press, and other publishers. His own collection of short fiction and essays, Strawberries and Other Erotic Fruits was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award. 

KISS YOUR DARLINGS: AN EDITOR ADVISES YOU TO ABANDON ALL ADVICE

Maybe you’ve followed the classic maxim and killed so many of your darlings, you can’t find a pulse in your latest draft. In this interactive session, bring your questions, your assumptions, your anxieties, and we’ll explore what happens when we shut out the exterior voices and listen for our own. But what voices, exactly, are acquiring editors listening for, and how should that influence our writing? We’ll discuss the editor’s role in publishing, past and present, art vs. commerce, and storytelling vs. style. Timothy Schaffert is Director of Creative Writing and founder/co-editor of Zero Street, the LGBTQ+ fiction series at the University of Nebraska Press. He is the Author of seven novels with the latest being the national bestseller The Titanic Survivors Book Club and The Perfume Thief, both from Doubleday/Penguin Random House.

THINKING CINEMATICALLY

Screenwriters face the unique challenge of creating visual representations for abstract ideas and emotions. They must use minimal description and dialogue to make readers of their scripts see a movie as they read. Through exercises and examples, participants of this workshop will learn to think cinematically in a way that can serve as a valuable tool for writers of prose and poetry. Elisabeth Nonas is a novelist and screenwriter. She taught screenwriting and writing for emerging media at Ithaca College for twenty-five years. Her most recent novel, Grace Period, was published in 2024. She is currently working on a sequel.

AUTHENTIC REPRESENTATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN FICTION

This interactive workshop will explore the complex portrayal of mental illness in fiction through group discussion and analysis of published works of fiction. Participants will examine excerpts from both historical and contemporary novels to analyze how mental health is depicted across genres and time periods. In this workshop, we will consider questions about the writer’s responsibility when representing mental illness and how such portrayals can shape societal perceptions. We will examine stereotypes, the fine line between humor and sensitivity, and how to create a complex character with a mental health diagnosis. Kate Segriff is an award-winning writer and filmmaker whose debut collection of short stories, Animals in Captivity, was published in 2024. She is a medical doctor who works in primary mental health care, palliative care, and urgent care.  

POINT OF VIEW

How do you decide which point of view is the correct one to carry your story? Finding the right POV can take a story to a higher level when explored and rendered in the proper voice. In this session, we’ll ask: what are the benefits of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd POV, both limited and omniscient? How do they differ? Is the emotionality of 1st person more important than its unreliability? Is the omniscience of the 3rd person problematic for sketching out the interiority of characters and their conflicts? Each story has a different answer to these very pertinent questions, and it behooves a writer to reflect on them. We’ll do some exercises and likely have some breakthroughs by exploring our stories through different views. Trebor Healey teaches creative writing for UCLA and has authored several award-winning novels, a recent novella and numerous short story collections. 

WRITING QUEER POEMS: THE POWER OF “THINGNESS”

Two of our queer ancestors, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, didn’t agree on much, but both were firmly rooted in the conviction that poetry speaks to us through our bodies. An essential part of any poet’s work is to find the details that evoke an object, person, or place with exactness. In this workshop, we’ll look closely at some LGBTQ+ poems that enter into story and deep feeling through a particular object or group of objects, often with a dive into greater emotional intensity. We’ll explore this process at work with such poets as Judy Grahn, Eduardo Corral, Audre Lorde, Thom Gunn, and Joy Ladin. We’ll extend the notion of “thingness” to include memorable sensory images other than those that are simply visual. Participants will write something new in response to prompts sparked by the examples we’ve discussed. Whether you are new to poetry or widely published, this generative workshop will free and refresh your practice, igniting work in your own inimitable voice. Joan Larkin’s sixth book of poems, Old Stranger, was published in August by Alice James Books. She received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.

FROM FLAT TO FULL: WRITING FULLY-FORMED ANTAGONISTS AND MINOR CHARACTERS

Creating a protagonist who has a history, depth, and a vibe is easy—they’re the main character, after all! But all too often, our antagonists (or villains) are one-note and become caricatures. Minor characters can become cliché or flat if we ignore them. This workshop will give writers shortcuts on how to make their antagonists and minor characters as alive, diverse, and vibrant as their main characters, even if they often have less time on the page. Through a combination of prewriting and revision exercises, participants will learn techniques for character development that take their characters from flat to full. Reine Dugas is an English professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. When not writing, she’s the assistant editor of Louisiana Literature and editor of the magazines, Louisiana Life and Acadiana Profile.

BETWEEN MEMOIR AND FICTION

Many writers have a hard time deciding whether memoir or fiction is the better vessel to carry their own deepest narratives. What if they didn’t have to choose? More and more, writers are finding a beautiful blend between memoir and fiction. These meaningful stories benefit from both the magical toolkit of fiction as well as the personal identification and intense emotion of memoir writing. In this workshop, we will discover the beauty that comes from fusing fiction and memoir writing. Donna Minkowitz is the author of the autofiction novel Donnaville, the magical realist memoir Growing Up Golem, and the Lammy-award-winning memoir Ferocious Romance.