FMU to host 2025 Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival

Francis Marion will host the 18th annual Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival on campus November 6-7.

This year’s featured authors include Essie Chambers, Marcus Wicker, Dailihana Alfonseca, and Ken Autrey.

The two-day festival will offer panel discussions, lectures, book signings, and more. All events are free and open to the public and will take place in Lowrimore Auditorium on FMU’s main campus.

Essie Chambers is an author and award-winning independent producer. Her bestselling debut novel, Swift River—a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club pick—won the 2024 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize and was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, Elle, and more. It was also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, among others. A former TV executive turned filmmaker, Essie produced the Oscar-shortlisted documentary Descendant, released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground and Netflix. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and Baldwin for the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of three books of poetry: DEAR MOTHERSHIP (forthcoming from Ecco), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017)—winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award—and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023 – 2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is an Associate Professor and the Orgill Chair of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.

Dailihana Alfonseca is a writer, researcher, and professor who currently resides in South Carolina. Her writing blends multidirectional research of medical data, personal narratives, and fiction to analyze the insanity seen in the literature of immigrant women and reflect on her own childhood traumas. She hopes her writing helps people feel seen and understood. When she’s not writing, she can be found rescuing dogs, volunteering at the literacy center, or traveling with her family.

Ken Autrey lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he helps coordinate the Third Thursday Poetry Series. He earned degrees from Davidson College, Auburn University, and the University of South Carolina. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where he taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and advanced composition. Previously, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana and taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He spent one year as a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan. Autrey’s work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review and many other journals. He has published four chapbooks: Pilgrims (Main Street Rag), Rope Lesson (Longleaf Press), The Wake of the Year (Solomon and George Press), and Penelope in Repose (Evening Street Press). He is the author of the full-length collections Circulation and Vocation, both from Dos Madres Press. He is married to Janne Debes. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.

The Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival began in 2006 and is coordinated by FMU’s English faculty.

For a full schedule and additional information about the November 6-7 event, visit peedeefiction.org.