Literary Festival Welcomes Authors

St. Mark’s ended the first week of 2018 with the eleventh annual Literary Festival. This year, six noted writers attended the Festival, including:
  • Stacy Clark, children’s author
  • Billy Crockett, singer-songwriter
  • Evan Daugherty ’00, film screenwriter (Divergent, Snow White and the Hunstman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
  • Tony Earley, fiction writer, essayist, and Vanderbilt University professor
  • Dana Goodyear, poet, University of Southern California professor, and staff writer for The New Yorker
  • Mike Wilson, Editor of The Dallas Morning News
The Festival kicked off on Thursday afternoon, with a special performance by Billy Crockett. On Friday, the six visiting writers spent the day across campus, visiting with students in English and journalism classes, discussing their work and process and answering questions. They also came together for a special panel discussion during Upper School assembly, titled “Writing in the 21st Century.” The writers answered questions from Literary Festival Chair Sahit Dendekuri ’18 and Vice-Chair Jack Trahan ’20, as well as from students in the audience.

“I may not have been the best student at St. Mark’s, but I internalized a lot of the lessons,” Evan Daugherty told students. “The idea of putting in your hours, doing your homework, getting up early, being over prepared, being early instead of five minutes late – these are things that have served me tremendously well in the field I’m in. That discipline was the most important thing I got out of St. Mark’s.”

During the panel discussion, the winners of the annual writing contest were also announced. Numerous student entries in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry were judged by a panel of Upper School teachers and the six visiting writers.
Congratulations to these winning authors:
  • Fiction: “Eighteen Years” by Austin Montgomery ’18
  • Nonfiction: “Vita Est Lux” by Cole Arnett ’19
  • Poetry: “Wrinkles” by Davis Bailey ’18
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St. Mark’s School of Texas is a private, nonsectarian college-preparatory boys’ day school for students in grades 1 through 12, located in Dallas, Texas. St. Mark’s aims to prepare young men to assume leadership and responsibility in a competitive and changing world.

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