Playwright Tess Onwueme is the featured speaker of UWEC’s English Fest.

The UW-Eau Claire English Festival is a weeklong event (April 26-30) featuring various panels and readings from students, faculty, and other community members. And yet, literature is only the core of the festival itinerary. Music lovers will gravitate toward Music on the Mall, which includes the bands Feathe, The Heart Pills, Hitide.Lotide, and Downer’s Grove, all playing UWEC’s Campus Mall noon to one Monday through Thursday, respectively, and finally Will Hutchinson playing the Cabin Friday at 11:30 am. Poetry lovers will take solace in an International Poetry Reading (April 26) and NOTA Open Mic (April 29), while playwrights and many others await English Fest’s featured speaker, Dr. Tess Onwueme. The internationally known Nigerian dramatist was appointed as a Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity at UWEC in 1994, and has published numerous works that tell the often unheard stories of young women who are caught in the struggle of negotiating issues of race, class, gender, family, and tradition in a post-colonial African society. She was also the recipient of the Fonlon-Nichols Award (a precursor to the Nobel Prize) in 2009 and was the subject of an international conference at the University of Abuja, Nigeria in November 2009. Onwueme’s presentation and reception, “Staging the Invisible,” will take place in the Council Fire Room, Davies Center at 8 pm on April 29. Visit VolumeOne.org for the complete list of English Fest events.