Signs of the budding Catholic literary renaissance keep popping up. In the nine years since we started Dappled Things, it has been very exciting to see how quickly things seem to be picking up steam. The National Catholic Register just posted an article in which I’m quoted, discussing the growing number of literary prizes offered for Catholic literature. For those of you who are interested, we remind you that we are currently accepting submissions both to our fiction and nonfiction prizes, each paying multiple cash prizes of up to $500.
Meanwhile, Dana Gioia has organized what looks to be the kickoff conference for a new era of Catholic literature, titled the The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination. We’ve briefly mentioned this event before, but the more details we learn, the better it looks. The conference is drawing some of the most renowned authors in the United States, including Gioia himself as well as others such as Alice McDermott, Ron Hansen, Julia Alvarez, Kevin Starr, and Tobias Wolff. The conference will be held at the University of Southern California and will include sessions ranging from “The Jesuit Imagination in Literature” to “Latino Catholic Writers.” Our own Meredith Wise and Joshua Hren will participate in various sessions, including one titled “Catholic Literati: The New Generation.” There will even be special sections for high school attendees, where students will get to workshop with writers like Hansen, Gioia, and McDermott. Mark your calendars.
On a different note, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is finally getting some money of his own. Colombia, seems to have a knack for honoring writers in its currency. The country already features the poet Jose Asuncion Silva in one of its bills—including he full text of his poem “Nocturno”—as well as novelist Jorge Isaacs, author of Maria, the premier work of 19th century Colombian Romanticism. Now, the Colombian congress has just approved a law to feature the recently deceased Nobel Prize winning author in one of its future bills. Its about time someone devoted some money to the arts!
