Charleston Literary Festival’s Wednesday announcement of a new executive director, Sarah Moriarty, heralds a fresh era for the annual festival, which started in 2017.
Moriarty, who previously served as the festival’s director of marketing, is a branding specialist and marketing creative with a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in literature from Trinity College Dublin and Freie Universität Berlin, respectively.
The two-week Charleston Literary Festival offers highly curated programming with national and international authors, celebrating literature’s power to change perspectives and promote free exchange of ideas.
Moriarty said she is dedicated to supercharging the efforts of the festival in the student community in 2023 by building on programming introduced last year and inviting more students from colleges and high schools to interact with invited speakers and authors.
“Some of the most powerful moments we had at the festival in 2022 came from these moments of interaction between the students we invite to the festival, or who come to the festival, and the authors that we invite,” she said.
“It benefits the students, because they get exposed to new ideas and these big name authors, but it also benefits the authors, because they get the excitement and enthusiasm of the students. That benefits the festival as a whole, because our mission is to create a forum for the free exchange of ideas around books.”
The festival is currently developing the lineup for 2023, which will take place this November. Moriarty told the City Paper folks can expect to see the finalized lineup by the end of summer.
The festival partnered in 2022 with Oakwood University, a historically Black, Seventh Day Adventist institution in Huntsville, Ala., inviting six students and three faculty members to festival sessions and a private brunch with Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson and National Book Award winner Imani Perry.
The festival also welcomed students from Marvin Ridge High School in North Carolina to sessions and a private pizza party with Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and author Renee Dudley.
“We want to think about inviting people to come to us, but also questioning, how do we also create experiences where students themselves are recognized and empowered to express their ideas?” Moriarty said. “Those moments that happened last year were so instructive and transformative, and so then the question really is how do we develop a robust student initiative that continues on the success of what we saw last year?”
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