The Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival will return for its 19th year on November 5 and 6 at Francis Marion University’s Lowrimore Auditorium in Florence. This free event will feature a variety of award-winning authors, including Jericho Brown, who is the festival's headlining poet and a Pulitzer Prize winner known for creating the modern poetic form called duplex.
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Jo Angela Edwins, an English professor at FMU and an organizer of the festival, has long included Brown's poetry in her curriculum. She highlighted the significance of his work in contemporary poetry, stating, "Not only did he invent it, but it really took off."
Other featured authors include Kiersten White, Marcella Pixley, and former Texas Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla. Edwins remarked on the unique opportunity for Florence residents to engage with such high-profile writers, as similar events typically take place in larger cities like Charleston or Columbia. She mentioned that some of her poet friends have even made travel plans to attend the festival.
The festival will launch with a panel featuring Quintanilla at 10 a.m. on November 5, concluding with a reading and book signing by Brown at 7 p.m. on November 6. Edwins expressed that the festival aims to inspire young people to embrace storytelling as a means of understanding their lives. She noted the enthusiasm of students, who often ask probing questions about character motivations and human nature during events.
"We want to encourage our students to realize, ‘You can be a creator of some sort. You can be an inventor of story yourself. You can tell your own story,’" Edwins stated.