National Book Awards Festival at Sam Houston State University
Three years ago, Sam Houston State University got involved with the National Book Awards on
Campus, and once again this year hosted three National Book Awards Finalists. The National
Book Awards Festival at Sam Houston, as it is now called, took place March 16-18, and
consisted of several literary events which were open to the public.
The finalists who visited this year were novelist Angela Flournoy, poet Ada Limon, and graphic
novelist Noelle Stevenson. Each of them specializes in a different genre and offered up many
interesting and diverse writing styles.
“The National Book Award is an honor presented to four writers in four genres annually,” said
clinical assistant professor in creative writing and coordinator of the National Book Awards
Festival, Amanda Nowlin-O’Banion. “ It’s the best in American literature for that year. Former
National Book Award Winners are Alice Walker and William Faulkner. This was their sixty-sixth
year presenting the award, but only the eleventh year the National Book Foundation has been
going onto college campuses with this program.”
Wednesday (March 16) was the first day of the festival, and commenced with a meet-and-greet
and book signing at the Huntsville Public Library.
“It was an opportunity for the public to mingle with writers they would probably never have an
opportunity to meet here in town,” said Nowlin-O’Banion.
There was also a new event called BookUp Bash, which raised money for the Huntsville BookUp
site, a joint project with the National Book Foundation that bring books to middle grade
students in an afterschool program. This event took place on Thursday (March 17) at The
Wynne Home Arts Center and provided children with entertainment at eight different activity
stations.
“All of the stations had book-related activities, like literary charades, origami bookmarks,
Huntsville Pets Helping People, which is a service animal organization that provided dogs
trained to let children read to them,” said Nowlin-O’Banion. “Each station was sponsored by a
local business, and that’s how we raised money. It was an event free to kids, and we publicized
it through the public school system.”
Finally, the premiere event was on Friday (March 18) in the Gaertner Performing Arts Center of
SHSU. This event included a reading, during which each author read from her work for twenty
minutes, followed by an on-stage interview moderated by Steph Opitz, former director of the
Texas Book Festival.
The authors were asked questions about how the process of writing their books began, the
most difficult parts, how criticism affected their work, what their proudest moment of writing
their book was and more. Many students involved in the English department attended the
event and found it to be helpful and inspirational.
“I really enjoyed how they said at some point you have to stop writing for other people,” said
Jill Taylor, sophomore at Sam Houston State University.
Along with Concordia College, Rollins College and Amherst College, SHSU is one of only four
universities to host National Book Awards on Campus.
“The program got started because I was a BookUp volunteer. Because of that connection, our
relationship developed, and they asked if Sam Houston would like to host National Book
Awards on Campus program.”
The goal of the National Book Awards is to remind people what role literature can and does
play in society today and demonstrate how it is just as good, if not better than it’s ever been.
“I always tell people that this event is not meant to make the audience into writers,” said
Nowlin-O’Banion. “I just want people to read more and see how literature is still very relevant,
and that there are voices coming forward that we would not have ever heard before in the last
millennium.”