News Center

Hendrix College Students, Literary Magazine Honored by Southern Literary Festival

CONWAY, Ark. (February 20, 2018) – The Southern Literary Festival’s annual contest has again recognized Hendrix College students for their creative writing.

In the Creative Nonfiction category, Sarah Weems ’19 won first place for “On Orange Forests and Minds”; Peyton Coffman ’19 took second place in the Short Story category for “Angelina”; and in the Print Journal category, Hendrix’s student literary magazine, the Aonian, received an honorable mention. Ellie Black ’18 served as editor-in-chief. 

Contest winners have their work included in an anthology and are invited to read at the festival. This year, the Southern Literary Festival takes place April 4-7 at the University of Tennessee-Martin. The Hendrix-Murphy Foundation provides financial support for sending the student winners from Hendrix to participate.

“I’m delighted to see the hard work of our creative writing students recognized at the Southern Literary Festival,” said Dr. Tyrone Jaeger, Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program. “It’s a great pleasure to work with writers as dedicated and talented as Sarah, Peyton, and Ellie.”

About the Southern Literary Festival

The first Southern Literary Festival was held in April of 1937 at Blue Mountain College. Authors associated with the festival have included Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Katherine Anne Porter, John Gould Fletcher, and Flannery O’ Connor, as well founding member Robert Penn Warren. Originally celebrating the traditionally Southern, the festival has expanded to include a broader, more diverse portrait of what it means to hail from the American South and to write from a Southern perspective. For more information, visit www.southernliteraryfestival.org

About Hendrix College

A private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas, Hendrix College consistently earns recognition as one of the country’s leading liberal arts institutions, and is featured in Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges. Its academic quality and rigor, innovation, and value have established Hendrix as a fixture in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings. Founded in 1876, Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. To learn more, visit www.hendrix.edu.