UC Riverside’s annual Writers Week is a gathering of literary titans.
In its 46th year, Writers Week — the free, longest running and most diverse literary festival in California — will honor authors Percival Everett and Mike Davis. Davis, who passed away October 2022, will be honored posthumously.
Scheduled from February 13-17, Writers Week will feature 33 of the most celebrated writers in America. Authors also include UCR faculty, alumni, and staff. Readings and conversations will be live-streamed, with four live in-person events at UCR. All events are free, including the UCR Creative Writing/Los Angeles Review of Books Lifetime Achievement Awards celebration in honor of Everett and Davis. The award ceremony will be on February 14 at UCR. Registration is now open for all events.
“Diversity has been a central job for American literary culture over the past 150 years and Writers Week embodies that,” said Tom Lutz, Writers Week co-director, distinguished professor and chair of UCR’s Department of Creative Writing, and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books. “Authors who join us during Writers Week bring about their unique voices, experiences, perspectives as an integral part of their art. We hope the community joins us for another incredible year.”
Everett is the author of more than 30 novels and story collections, including “Dr. NO” (2022); “The Trees” (2021), which won the 2022 Ainisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize; “Telephone” (2020), which was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in fiction; “So Much Blue” (2017); “Glyph” (2014); “Percival Everett by Virgil Russell” (2013); “I Am Not Sidney Poitier” (2009); and “Erasure” (2001), all published by Graywolf Press. Everett has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, Dos Passos Prize, the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other recognitions.
Davis is the author of more than a dozen books, including his best-known works, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles,” “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World,” and his latest, “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.”
His work made him an internationally renowned writer, political activists, urban theorist, and historian. Davis joined UCR’s Department of Creative Writing in July 2008 and retired eight years later. He remained a distinguished professor emeriti until his death from esophageal cancer on October 25, 2022.
“We honor Mike Davis for his contributions to UCR, to the Southland, to the country, and the world,” Lutz said.
Writers Week will offer two sessions per day, 1-2:15 p.m. and 2:30-3:45 p.m. All virtual sessions are captioned and ASL translated. The in-person events will take place at UCR’s Interdisciplinary South (INTS) building 1128.
