This past weekend, Silver City hosted the Southwest Festival of the Written Word. The SWFWW is a biannual event that allows people to come together to meet and hear from some of their favorite authors. The festival focuses on authors who come from and write about the southwest region. Each of the authors featured comes and gives a talk or does a Q&A panel, sells their books, and participate in book signings.
The festival was sponsored by a number of organizations including the WNMU Bookstore, the New Mexico Humanities Council, New Mexico True, Freeport-McMoRan, Silver City Daily Press, Silver City Radio, and the Town of Silver City. The events were all scattered around Downtown Silver City with headquarters at the Murray Hotel on Broadway Street.
Sigma Tau Delta, WNMU’s English Honors Society, also had presence at the event in the form of six members who volunteered their time and participated in three panels on Friday, while several more members attended events the following day.
“SWFWW is truly remarkable in a town of our size, and we are lucky to have the Festival.” Dr. Michael Ann Nelson of the Humanities Department and Sigma Tau Delta said. “It is important to acknowledge and celebrate the literary arts because I often think they are overlooked in our media-saturated society.”
A few of the authors who presented were Lee K. Abbott, Jennifer Cervantes, Daniel Chacón, Denise Chávez, Philip Connors, Sharma Apt Russell, and Western New Mexico University’s very own JJ Wilson. Literary agent Peter Riva also spoke on Friday about the publishing industry in the Old Elks Lodge.
The event also held activities and workshops for children and teenagers to get them excited about literature and the written word. Unfortunately a few felt that there was a distinct lack of young people to participate in those activities. Dr. Nelson believed that WNMU and Sigma Tau Delta were key to changing this.
“The students who are going to be more inclined to attend the SWFWW are English Majors, and we just don’t have enough English majors in our program at Western.” Nelson said. “In order to get more young people involved, we need more English majors and need to form a partnership with the SWFWW that involves them in the organizing and planning of the festival.”
The festival lasted through the weekend, finally concluding on Sunday morning. Nelson looked back on the festival optimistically, stating, “Theater, film, music, and even art are more communal in nature and easier to stage large events around. Reading and writing are often solitary activities, so I think they are easy to overlook for this reason as well. It is nice to spotlight them every once in awhile.”
You can learn more about the festival at their website, www.swwordfiesta.org.
Additional Reporting by Eric Lowe.
