FMU to host 2024 Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival

Francis Marion will host the 17th annual Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival on campus November 7-8.

This year’s authors include Jamila Minnicks, Santiago García, Franny Choi, and Jo Angela Edwins.

The two-day festival features panel discussions, lectures, book signings and more. All events are free and open to the public and will be held in Lowrimore Auditorium on FMU’s main campus.

Jamila Minnicks won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction for her debut novel, Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023). In 2022, she was awarded a Tennessee Williams scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her short fiction and essays have been published in CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, and The Write Launch among others. Additionally, her piece “Politics of Distraction” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Howard University School of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Santiago García has been creating comics for over 15 years. His works include El vecion: Origen and El vecino: Historias with Pepo Pérez; La tempestad, Héroes del espacio, and El fin del mundo with Javier Peinado; Beowulf with David Rubín; Tengo hambre with Manel Fontdevila; and Fútbol: La novela gráfica with Pablo Ríos. In 2015, he received the award for the Best Spanish work of the year at the Salón del Cómic in Barcelona and the National Comic Prize for Las meninas, and was nominated for the Eisner Award in 2018 for the best American edition of international material when it was published by Fantagraphics as The Ladies-in-Waiting. His academic essay La novela gráfica has been translated in Brazil and the United States (United Press of Mississippi), and earned him the prize for best writing on comics at the Salón del Cómic in Barcelona in 2011. El vecino has been adapted as a television series for Netflix, and ¡Garcia! has been adapted for HBO Max.

Franny Choi is a poet and essayist with works including The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Choi’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, among others. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship, Princeton’s Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Elgin Award, Choi is a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge.  Currently, Choi is working on an essay collection about Asian robot women.

Jo Anglea Edwins is a native of South Carolina, professor at Francis Marion University, and poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.  She has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies including The Hollins Critic, Calyx, Descant, and New South. Edwins is the author of the collection A Dangerous Heaven (2023, Gnashing Teeth Publishing) and the chapbooks Bitten (forthcoming 2024, dancing girl press) and Play (2016, Finishing Line Press). She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, the Jasper Project, and the SC Academy of Authors. Edwins has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry.

The Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival began in 2006 and is coordinated by FMU’s English faculty.

For a full schedule and additional information about the November 7-8 event, visit peedeefiction.org.