The F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival will honor acclaimed National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, on Saturday, Oct. 15, with the 2022 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature.
The award has been presented to some of America’s most distinguished writers, including Richard Russo, Annie Proulx, Norman Mailer, Pat Conroy, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Amy Tan.
The festival will take place at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Rockville on Oct. 15.
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival was established in 1996 to celebrate the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birth and the city where Fitzgerald, his wife and daughter are buried — the festival is co-sponsored by the City of Rockville and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference, Inc. The festival is for writers, book lovers and Fitzgerald fans.
For more information and to register visit www.fscottfestival.org/registration.
For Fitzgerald’s 127th birthday, at 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 24, the festival committee will present a free virtual discussion of the author’s “other” novel, “The Beautiful and Damned,” featuring panelists William Blazek, Kirk Curnutt and David W. Ullrich, editors of “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned: New Critical Essays.”
The festival sponsors two short story contests: for students, open to Montgomery County high school students, and adults, open to residents of Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. The winners and two runners-up in each contest will be announced, awarded cash prizes, and will read from and comment briefly from their stories on the evening of Thursday, Oct. 6.
The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival, at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, will present readings in tribute to Powers and the festival’s theme of “Stories and the More-Than-Human,” featuring Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, novelist Priyanka Champaneri and novelist Eugenia Kim, with concluding remarks by Powers. The event will be at the center, 4508 Walsh St., Bethesda.
For details, visit www.writer.org/event/richard-powers. For more information on the festival, visit www.fscottfestival.org.