The Nevada Literary Crawl finally comes back after two years of being gone due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
After two whole years without the annual Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, fans are pleased to hear it’s back and better than ever.
All the lovers of the humanities have been wandering around aimlessly, waiting for the COVID-19 pandemic to ease up and allow the crawl to come back.
Finally, to everyone’s satisfaction, Nevada Humanities announced the Literary Crawl’s revival on their Instagram on Aug. 2.
The last one was held in 2019, and many literary fanatics are wondering what the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl actually is.
Here’s the breakdown: imagine a scavenger hunt of readings from authors, panel discussions from artists, workshops with professionals, combined into a festival where you can share your thoughts on books, art, ideas and basically anything you want.
It is basically a dream come true for literature, art and other humanities fans out there.
The event only takes place on one day, which was Saturday, Sept. 10 this year, and it’s filled with a bunch of different scheduled events to choose from.
However, this year there was a “Prologue Launch Party” hosted at the Holland Project the night before the event, which allowed the humanities lovers to get a little taste of what the following day was going to be like.
The morning of Saturday though, the crawl had a “keynote introductory event, which featured writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil and her talk on poetry and nature as well as her new book “World of Wonders.”
After the introductory events, participants were free to cruise around downtown Reno, searching for whatever event their heart desired.
Eunkang Koh, Axie Oh and Naseem Jamnia share their stories at a panel discussion event.
The day was divided into “chapter” sections, meaning each chapter was a designated time and place for an event.
The program not only had addresses and times available for each event, but each crawler had access to a map in case they couldn’t find where something was at.
The planner also had a checklist for each literary bug to make sure they did everything they wanted to do on their literary escapade through Reno.
With a total of six chapters throughout the day, the participants had the option of three to eight events to choose from when attending a new place in each chapter.
The events ranged from whatever you might be feeling in that moment. They had readings and book signings from authors, panel discussions about writing and art, workshops where you could learn new skills in any of the humanities and many more fun opportunities to choose from.
A lot of the events were at pubs or taverns nearby, so the literary bugs could also grab a drink whenever they jumped to a new place.
In the epilogue of the event, they gave the option of an open mic prose event or a performance from Charity Kiss before everyone was invited to the readings of poetry work by the Nevada Poetry Project with poet Laureate Gailmarie Pahmeier.
Eunkang Koh, Axie Oh and Naseem Jamnia discuss their literary stories on a panel during the “Tell Tales Out of School” event.
The event cooled off by 8:30 p.m., with the only downside of the whole day being the thick smoke and hazy weather.
However, all the literary bugs seemed to enjoy themselves and most of the humanities fans are looking forward to the crawl again next year.
Besides, where would they be without a nice crawl to stretch their legs and work their brains?
Jaedyn Young can be reached at jaedynyoung@sagebrush.unr.edu or on Twitter @jaedyn_young3.
