37th Annual Literary Festival at ODU: October 6-10, 2014

The Hungry Heart Is Telling You

The vision of the 2014 ODU Literary Festival foregrounds the relationships of food and sustenance in a variety of literary, cultural, poetic, political, and other contexts.

As we require food for our bodies, we also require food for the mind and spirit. The poet Denise Levertov once wrote: “The world/ is not with us enough,” and therefore we must make haste to “taste and see… all that lives/ to the imagination’s tongue.”

As oceans rise and natural calamities increase in frequency and violence, as wars rage and food and fuel sources reach critical points across the world, we face our individual and collective futures with a greater sense of anxiety.

Besides a deeper kind of nourishment, in poems and stories, songs and art we find the promise of healing energy and inspiration, and the capacity to bring us together in the presence of new and remembered pleasures.

Join us at the table this October to feast on and share in these gifts of literature--- we hope all will be fortified for all the rest that is yet to come.

~ Luisa A. Igloria and Mike Pearson, Festival Directors