Save the date: March 26th through March 30th, 2008.

Sunday, March 11 2007 @ 04:22 PM CDT

We’re busy planning our 2008 season with celebrated authors, artists, and you. For five days this spring,The Tennessee Williams Festival wil light up the French Quarter with culture, food and fun, bringing back some favorite voices and exciting new ones as well.

Here are just a few of the people you’ll see at the 2008 Festival:

Hal Crowther’s current collection of essays, Gather at the River, is a National Book Award nominee. For his first collection, Unarmed But Dangerous, he was cited by Kirkpatrick Sale as “the best essayist working in journalism today.” Cathedrals of Kudzu received the Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council and the 1999-2001 Fellowship Prize for Non-Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Dan Menaker will also be in attendance. Dan is the author of the 1998 novel, The Treatment, as well as two short-story collections, The Left and Friends and Relations. He began his twenty-six-year career at The New Yorker as a fact checker in 1969, rising through the ranks to become a senior editor specializing in fiction. He was the first editor to publish such newcomers as Michael Cunningham, Michael Chabon, and Jennifer Egan. He also worked with authors Alice Munro, Elmore Leonard, Salman Rushdie, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Pauline Kael. In 1995 he became Vice President and Senior Literary Editor at Random House

Tift Merritt is best known for her intricate song lyrics. She has garnered critical acclaim from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and CNN. Her 2004 album,Tambourine, was Grammy-nominated for Best Country Album. In 2004 Merritt was nominated for Album, Artist, and Song of the Year by the Americana Music Association.

Lee Smith is the author of 10 novels and 3 collections of short stories. Her novel, The Last Girls, was a New York Times best-seller as well as a co-winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Her tenth novel, On Agate Hill, was named a Washington Post Book World Best Book, inspired a new one-woman show, and was chosen for Western North Carolina’s “Together We Read” program, which involves 22 countries.

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