HACC's Wildwood Writers' Festival features local talent

For more than 25 years HACC faculty has attracted accomplished writers and students interested in the written word to the annual Wildwood Writers' Festival held on the Harrisburg Campus. This spring HACC faculty members hope to attract even more admirers of poetry and fiction writing when they offer a schedule that draws on the strong talents found within the local community.

The 27th annual Wildwood Writers' Festival will be held on Thursday, April 12, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m., and Friday, April 13, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., in the C. Ted Lick Wildwood Conference Center. The festival is free and open to the public. Registration is not required.

The festival features sessions with published poets, award winning writers and local professors.

"Year after year this event continues to grow," said Geri Gutwein, Ph.D., associate professor of English. "Not only do we see more and more students attending the sessions, but we have loyal members of the community who return each year."

In addition to locally based writers who have earned multiple recognitions, the festival will feature the following writers:

• Linda Hogan, a descendant of the Chickasaw nation. Hogan will travel from Colorado to explore how the damage we do to the environment damages us and how the natural world we wound instructs us on how to heal both it and ourselves. Her writing has made her a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as earned her the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Colorado Book Award.

• Julia Kasdorf, a Penn State University faculty member, has published two collections of poetry which won the Agnus Lynch Starrett Prize and the Great Lakes Award for New Writing. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Poetry. She also wrote a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, named the Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

In addition to the sessions with writers, those who attend the festival can anticipate an open reading, as well as the opportunity for questions and answers. For more information, contact Geri Gutwein, associate professor of English at HACC, telephone 717-780-2433 or email at gcgutwei@hacc.edu.