Highland Park Literary Festival

In 1995, the Highland Park Literary Festival was born from a collaboration between interested parents and the English Department of Highland Park High School in Dallas. The goal of the HP Literary Festival is to inspire and encourage students to celebrate language in its artfully written, spoken, and sung forms.

At the heart of the festival are over 60 workshops between students and accomplished novelists, journalists, poets, songwriters, and playwrights. Also, at a student-run open-mic night, students perform their own works. A writing contest and special awards breakfast recognizes outstanding student works of poetry, fiction, and narrative non-fiction.

Finally, the festival offers an evening of readings and conversation with our keynote speaker that is free and open to the public. Please make plans to hear our 2011 keynote speaker, Pulitzer-prize winning playwrite, Doug Wright, on Thursday, February 17 at Highland Park High School. (A map is here.)

Find out more about the LitFest at You+Dallas.com, and check out some very interesting questions posed by Doug Wright here.

The festival gratefully acknowledges the support of La Fiesta de las Seis Banderas, HP Arts, the Highland Park High School PTA, and generous individual donors.

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning)..."

"May I have a bit of earth?"

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain."

"... angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..."

"... Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold"

"I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write."

"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL.

BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE
MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS."

"Where they burn books, they eventually will burn people also."

"He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew . . ."

"It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her."

"Wherever their laughter came from, Ender couldn't find such a place in himself. He was afraid, and fear made him serious."

"Goodnight room
Goodnight moon
Good night cow jumping over the moon"

"For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy..., they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

"You know that it's there, but you just don't know where — but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for."

"Be as smart as the snakes;
it's in the Bible!"

"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."

"I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living."

"I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse."

THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

"Thanks for watching Channel 4 News. You stay classy, San Diego. I'm Ron Burgundy?"

"Let us then proceed, but let us not try to deceive one another."