The Letters Festival is an annual gathering of artists and writers, showcasing the best in contemporary literature. Through readings, dialogues, and workshops, The Letters Festival offers creative writing education and engagement for the community. Past participating authors include Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jericho Brown, Sarah Rose Etter, Roxane Gay, Nicholas Goodly, Dorthea Lasky, Carmen Maria Machado, Sabrina Orah Mark, Scott McClanahan, Morgan Parker, Tommy ‘Teebs’ Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Leesa Cross-Smith, Susan Steinberg, Mathias Svalina, Justin Torres, and many others.

The Letters Festival

The 2025 Letters Festival is a two-day creative writing event hosted at the Goat Farm with live readings, generative writing workshops, performances, and dialogues, featuring some of the country’s most exciting contemporary authors and artists.

The 2025 Letters Festival will be hosted at the Goat Farm (1200 Foster St NW, Atlanta, GA 30318)

All events are sliding scale, $10 - $50.

Friday, Nov 14:

7 – 9PM
Readings by Emrys Donaldson, Zefyr Lisowski, Victoria Chang, and a performance by T. Lang.
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Saturday, Nov 15:

1:30 – 3:30PM: 

Poetics of Dread poetry workshop with Zefyr Lisowski

1:30 – 3:30PM:

Play[writing]: Playing on the Page workshop with Dana Stringer

4 – 6PM:

Opening Movements fiction workshop with Doug Jones

6:30 – 8:30PM: 

Readings by Sommer Browning, Danika Stegeman, Doug Jones, and a dramatic monologue by Dana Stringer.

Video art all weekend by Zen Cohen.

Author & Artist Bios

Dana L. Stringer is an Atlanta-based playwright, poet, teaching artist, and writing instructor with an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is a Cave Canem fellow and an associate artist at Out of Hand Theater. Her plays, staged readings, and dramatic monologues have been produced by True Colors Theatre, Theatrical Outfit, The Billie Holiday Theatre, Out of Hand Theater, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Vanguard Repertory Company, Fade to Black Play Festival, and other organizations. Dana is the author of the chapbook In Between Faith. Her poems are published in anthologies and literary journals like the African American Review and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

Danika Stegeman is the author of Ablation (11:11 Press, 2023) and Pilot (Spork Press, 2020).  She received a 2023 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant. Her video poem, “Then Betelgeuse Reappears” was an official selection for the 2021 Midwest Video Poetry Fest. She’s an assistant editor for Conduit and serves as board treasurer for Fonograf Editions. Along with Jace Brittain, she co-curates the online collaborative reading series It’s Copperhead Season. Stegeman received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University where she was awarded the Heritage Fellowship. She lives in St. Paul, MN. Her website is danikastegeman.com.

Doug Jones, an alumnus of Morehouse College, received his MFA from Columbia University.  His debut novel, The Fantasies of Future Things (Simon & Schuster) has been longlisted for the 2025 First Novel Prize.  His work has been anthologized in Black Love Letters (Zando Projects), Role Call:  A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art (Third World Press) and Sojourner:  Black Gay Voices  (Other Countries Press).  Doug has written for LitHub.com, Black Issues Book Review and Venus Magazine. An inaugural fellow of the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, Doug  lives in Atlanta.

Emrys Donaldson is the author of the short story collection The Iridescents (Texas Review Press). His stories have recently been anthologized in Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp Press) and published in venues such as LitHub and Electric Literature. He is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Geneseo.

Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She’s the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I’m Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You’re On My Period (Counterpath), and others. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Brooklyn Rail Lit Hub, Bomb, Artforum, Chicago Review, The American Poetry Review, The Comics Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

T. Lang is a shape-shifting architect of embodied Black futurism. Her work merges contemporary modern dance with immersive technology, poetic storytelling, and radical pedagogy to illuminate narratives rooted in identity, history, and community. With a choreographic language that is physically evocative and emotionally resonant, Lang invites audiences into powerful, subjective experiences shaped by cultural memory and collective inquiry as the Artistic Director of T. Lang Dance.  Lang was the Inaugural  Chair of the Dance Performance and Choreography Department at Spelman College, and  reimagined dance education through a decolonial lens; developing curricula that frame embodiment as a 21st-century intellectual, artistic, and civic practice. Her courses interrogate the movement of Black bodies through historical, political, and liberatory frameworks, positioning the classroom as both studio and site of social reckoning.

Victoria Chang's most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN Jean Stein Book Award. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory. She has written several children’s books as well and Eureka is forthcoming from FSG Books for Young Readers in 2026. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Zefyr Lisowski is the author of the forthcoming Uncanny Valley Girls, an essay collection about horror movies, exes, and intimacy (Harper Perennial 2025). A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Nonfiction and 2023 Queer|Art Fellow, she’s also the author of two poetry collections, Girl Work (Noemi Press 2024) and Blood Box (Black Lawrence 2019). Raised in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, Zefyr lives in Brooklyn and has seen grave robbers twice.

Zen Cohen received her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and BFA in Film, Video and Performance at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the deYoung Museum (CA), SFMOMA (CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (CA), Vanity Projects (NY), The Momentary (AR), and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno (CDMX, Mexico), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (CDMX, Mexico) and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (Canary Islands, Spain). Her photographs have been published in Hyperallergic, Art Practical, Artnet, Routledge and Southern Illinois University Press. She is the founder, director and curator of the Open Air Media Festival. This outdoor media arts program received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support the 2024 festival.