The sixth annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival – November 4 to 7/2021!
We thank all of you who participated in previous Festivals. We met many of you personally thus allowing us to put a ‘face’ on our loyal supporters. We hope to see all of you in Beaufort at every festival. The setting and planning for 2021 Festival are in an incipient stage. Please follow this page for future news!
Sixth Annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival Features In-Person and Virtual Events, November 4-7
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler (Late City); Alabama’s youngest and first African American Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones (Reparations, Now); literary activist and morning show host E. Ethelbert Miller (When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery); best-selling writers Patti Callahan (Once Upon a Wardrobe), Wiley Cash (When Ghosts Come Home), and Brian Panowich (Hard Cash Valley); award-winning photographer Andrew Feiler (A Better Life for Their Children); and Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship winner Elizabeth Robin (Where Green Meets Blue) and all five fellowship finalists are scheduled to headline this year’s sixth annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, November 4-7. The event includes thirteen free author events held in locations across Beaufort County and online, as well as eight writers workshops.
The annual Conroy Festival began as Pat Conroy’s 70th birthday celebration in October 2015 and now continues as an annual signature event of the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center. The festival is made possible each year by a generous gift from the Robert S. Handler Trust and through collaborations with a pantheon of community partners, this year including the Crescendo festival of Hilton Head Island, the Coastal Discovery Museum, Island Writers Network, Technical College of the Lowcountry, Beaufort County Black Chamber of Commerce, Beaufort Bookstore, NeverMore Books, Lowcountry Presbyterian Church, the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Beaufort High School’s DAYLO (Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization), and the Friends of the Beaufort Library. Grant support is provided by South Carolina Humanities, a nonprofit organization inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage.
The nonprofit Conroy Center is open to the public Thursday through Sunday, noon to 4:00 p.m. (with extended hours during the festival weekend) at 601 Bladen Street in historic downtown Beaufort.