2024 Fall Literary Festival

Hope to see you at this year's Fall Lit Fest!

Register Here

Registration is now open for Lit Youngstown's 8th Fall Literary Festival live in Youngstown, Oh! October 17-19. We are thrilled you'll be joining us. Registration will be open until September 15, or all seats are filled (no walk-ins, please). Registration is now closed.

This year's festival will feature 145 accomplished presenters from California to Maryland and Rhode Island to Florida, presenting on understanding, writing, teaching, translating, editing and publishing literature. Discover your new favorite writer; peruse the dozens of bookfair tables; get a jump on a new piece of writing; join a discussion on writing programs in the community college, publishing as a small press, nature and eco writing, coming to writing late in life, and so much more.

Registration is also open for bookfair tables (small presses, literary journals, businesses and programs; no individual authors, please). Bring your hardworking crew to this robust conference of hundreds of literary enthusiasts from across the country. We don't charge a table fee, but ask that all of your table staffers please register. Bookfair registration is now closed.

We hope you find our high quality conference affordable. If you are experiencing economic hardship, we invite you to click "Request a sponsorship." If you can swing it, please consider clicking "Sponsor a struggling writer." Here in Youngstown, we understand the importance of lowering barriers.

Registration fees:

Free: undergraduate and high school students; those requesting a hardship sponsorship; this year's planning committee members
$20: part-time faculty, graduate students
$45: presenters, bookfair table representatives (presses, journals, literary businesses, nonprofits or programs, not individual authors)
$65: general admission

This conference is being supported, in part, by funds awarded to the Board of Mahoning County Comissioners under Assistance Listing No. 21.027 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Featured Presenters

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award.

His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Willipa Bay AiR, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation.

In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.

Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.” Her stories, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

Her writing has won the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She has completed residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, The Circus Hotel (through The Reader Berlin), and Ragdale.

In 2019, the Guild Literary Complex named her one of 30 Writers to Watch. Originally from rural Wisconsin, Rachel earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Western Michigan University. She has taught writing and literature at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, The School of the Art Institute - Chicago, and Cornell College. She lives in Chicago.