Gemini Ink's Summer Literary Festival
set for July 7-20 in San Antonio

SAN ANTONIO -- Gemini Ink, San Antonio's independent literary center, is pleased to present Setting Our Own Place, the theme of its 6th Annual Summer Literary Festival. Running July 7-20, with a stunning array of writers and arts educators, the festival will explore the critical role of place in our work and lives. San Antonio's entire Southtown Arts district comes alive in celebration of Contemporary Art Month, and Gemini Ink is at the epicenter, with workshops, readings, and receptions in its elegantly contemporary art space. For more information and to register, visit www.geminiink.org or call (210) 734-9673.
Summer faculty include writers renowned for their work addressing place and culture, among them fiction writers Cristina García, Tom Grimes, and Debra Monroe, poets Martín Espada and Li-Young Lee, and non-fiction writers Paul Burka and John Phillip Santos. Two faculty members will bring their considerable experience to the matter of publication, an issue that always runs hot: Dr. Charles Rowell, esteemed scholar, poet, and editor of the premier African-American arts journal Callaloo, and Marcela Landres, associate editor with Simon and Schuster and a prominent advocate for publishing Latino writers.
Three in-service workshops for primary and secondary level instructors will be offered, with participants eligible for Continuing Professional Education credits. American Book Award-winning poet Martín Espada, San Antonio playwright and historian Sterling Houston, and Austin writer Grady Hillmann, a 20-year veteran in bringing creative writing workshops to correctional facilities, will be the instructors for these courses.
Rounding out the two week festivities are Necessary Monsters, a Dramatic Reader's Theater production inspired by a collaboration between Zapotec Mexican artist Francisco Toledo and Jorge Luis Borges, a writing camp for students ages 6-18, and a literary tour of San Antonio.
Gemini Ink, San Antonio's only independent literary center, celebrates the arts in literature by providing university- and master-level classes in the study and creation of literature and the related arts, creating collaborative arts programs, and providing literary opportunities for children and special-needs groups. Gemini Ink won the 2002 Downtown Alliance Award for Best Arts & Cultural Program and has been featured in The New York Times.