World Literature Today and OU is hosting the Neustadt Lit Fest beginning today, honoring the 2025 Neustadt Prize winner.
World Literature Today, an OU-founded magazine, focuses on promoting literature from all across the world. Founded in 1927, the publication has covered Nobel Prize winners and emerging writers alike, reaching 2.2 million readers annually and releases both digital and print editions.
To raise literary awareness at OU, World Literature Today hosts the Neustadt International Literary Festival — a three-day event that brings authors from around the world to speak with students interested in breaking into the literary field. Some of the writers attending this year include Threa Almontaser, Ioannis Andriotis, Maya Arad, Polina Barskova and Victoria Chang.
A major feature of the festival is the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature and Young Adult Literature. This biennial award honors an author selected by a jury of peers at the previous year’s festival.
Previous winners include Gene Luen Yang, Cynthia Leitich Smith and Margarita Engle.
This year's recipient is Cherie Dimaline, a member of the Georgian Bay Métis community in Canada and resides in Toronto. Dimaline is known for mentoring young Indigenous writers.
Her book “Marrow of Thieves” is a dystopian young adult story exploring the exploitation of Indigenous people. The Canadian bookseller Indigo.ca describes it as follows:
“Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The Indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden - but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.”
“Marrow of Thieves” has earned multiple awards since its 2017 release including:
Winner of the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award (Young People's Literature - Text)
Winner of the 2018 Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit and Métis Young Adult Literature
Each NSK Neustadt Prizewinner is chosen by a panel of writers, with each juror nominating one author for consideration.
Starting the festival is a Round Dance organized by OU’s Department of Native American Studies. Daniel Simon, assistant director and editor-in-chief of World Literature Today, said the department has been very involved in the process.
“The Native American Studies Department has been really involved as a partner, and they're helping us organize the round dance on Monday, Oct. 20, which is part of the opening ceremony, so as a way of welcoming our guests and honoring them and especially the students who are involved in this dance performance, they’re native or Indigenous students,” Simon said. “So it'll be a way to kind of appreciate native culture in Oklahoma and in the US and also kind of this pan-Indigenous idea of tribal cultures that go beyond our borders.”
Another highlight of the Neustadt Lit Festival is the collaboration with OU’s arts programs. Past festivals have partnered with the School of Drama and the School of Music. This year, World Literature Today is working with the School of Dance to premiere a new piece inspired by “The Marrow of Thieves.”
The dance is choreographed by Alma Borges Leyva, a graduate teaching assistant at the School of Dance pursuing her master of fine arts.
“This project is based on the book ‘The Marrow Thieves.’ However, my intention with the choreography is not to tell the literal story or create a piece that directly narrates the novel. Instead, it’s meant to be an abstraction of it,” Borges wrote in an email to OU Daily.
There are seven dancers who will perform, all playing many roles.
“They’re constantly shifting between being the victims and the ‘Recruiters,’ as the novel describes,” Leyva wrote. “It’s somewhat similar to what a nahual does — an Indigenous figure in Mexican culture who shifts forms.”
Leyva said that the piece is contemporary, which has been challenging for many of the dancers who have focused on modern training. To combat this, she has incorporated contemporary training to rehearsals.
The dance will premiere at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday in the Union Ballroom.
The full festival schedule is available online.
The festival begins at 3:30 p.m. Monday with President Joseph Harroz Jr.’s opening speech, followed by a Round Dance organized by OU’s Department of Native American Studies.
This story was edited by Madisson Cameron. Arthur Shamayev and Gretchen Schultz copy edited this story.
