ADA, Okla. – The annual Scissortail Creative Writing returns to East Central University, April 2-4, 2026, marking the 21st festival to take place. The event will take place inside ECU’s Bill S. Cole University Center.

Joseph Fasano, Traci Brimhall and Chera Hammons will be this year’s featured authors. The three-day event is free and the public is encouraged to attend.

The Scissortail Creative Writing Festival features Oklahoma’s most prestigious high school creative writing competition, the Annual Darryl Fisher Creative Writing Contest, now in its 22nd year. It is open to all state high school students submitting poetry or short works of fiction. Winners and awards for the state-wide competition, as well as the Undergraduate Contest, will be presented concurrent with the event.

The three-day festival attracts an array of known and up-and-coming authors from across Oklahoma and the country. More than 60 authors will be reading in 20-plus sessions. The schedule and updates are available at ecuscissortail.blogspot.com/.

For more information on the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival or questions about group attendance, email organizer Dr. Ken Hada at khada@ecok.edu.

Below are bios for each of the featured speakers. Full bios and information on all authors participating can be found on the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival blog.

Traci Brimhall

Brimhall is a University Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing and Narrative Medicine at Kansas State University and is celebrated for her unique poetry that intertwines the ordinary with the surreal. She has authored five poetry collections, including the recent "Love Prodigal" (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), and her work has been prominently featured in journals such as The New Yorker, Orion, The New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine. Brimhall's teaching experiences, supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Parks Service, and Academy of American Poets, have spanned diverse settings from farm schools to medical communities, reflecting her commitment to fostering creative expression across varied environments.

As the current Poet Laureate of Kansas, Brimhall has focused her initiatives on uniting the state's agricultural heritage with literary arts. Her advocacy includes projects like poetry cookbooks, food-based mad lib poems, and bringing poetry to the State Fair, aiming to enrich the lives of all Kansans through language.

Brimhall's literary contributions extend beyond poetry to include essays published in prestigious journals such as Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her accolades include awards like the Barnard Women Poets Prize for "Our Lady of the Ruins," and her work has been recognized in Best American Poetry anthologies.

Joseph Fasano

Fasano studied mathematics and astrophysics at Harvard University before changing his course of study and earning a degree in philosophy. He did his graduate study in poetry at Columbia University. As an educator, Fasano’s mission is to help each student synthesize diverse fields of study to develop a unique and informed voice, a depth of attention, and a capacity to break free of reductive mindsets. His "Poetry Prompts" have spread around the world, helping millions of people of all ages find their voices through the craft and magic of poetry.

Fasano is the author of two novels: The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry are The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024); The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018); Vincent (2015); Inheritance (2014); and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award."

A winner of the RATTLE Poetry Prize, he serves on the Editorial Board of Alice James Books, and is the Founder of the Poem for You Series. His writing has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Boston Review, American Poets, American Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, the Academy of American Poets' poem-a-day program, and many other publications. He is also a songwriter, and his debut album, The Wind That Knows The Way, is available wherever music is sold or streamed.

Chera Hammons

Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and has formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University.

Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in the Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere.

Her fifth full-length poetry collection, Birds of America, is forthcoming from The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. In her free time, she enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space.

-ECU-