Join us for the 10th Annual The Literary Festival!!

Amherst College will host the 10th annual LitFest, a literary festival celebrating fiction, nonfiction, poetry, spoken-word performance, and the College's extraordinary literary life. Guest speakers include award-winning author Teju Cole; Pulitzer Prize winner Brandon Som; Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic; and a special panel on the making of American Fiction with writer and director Cord Jefferson, lead actor Jeffrey Wright '87, and Percival Everett, author of Erasure, the novel upon which the film is based.

Schedule of Events:

1:00 pm: Craft Talks for Students: Percival Everett, Teju Cole, Paisley Rekdal, Brandon Som

Converse, various classrooms

Debut Stories: Brief Readings and Mingle with Amherst Alumni Authors and The Common Student Interns      
Introductions and remarks: Sam Spratford '24, Literary Editorial Fellow at The Common
Amherst Alumni Authors: Diane Exavier '09, Lola Milholland '07, Sarah Sawyer '97, JinJin Xu '17
The Common Student Interns: Alma Clark '25, Aidan Cooper '26, Sophie Durbin '25, Kei Lim '25, Sarah Wu '25  

3:00 pm - 4:30 pm: Friendly Reading Room, Frost Library
5:00 pm: Presidential Scholar Teju Cole in Conversation with Jennifer Acker '00