Registration is now open for The Lions in Winter creative writing festival, which will take place on Saturday, Jan. 26 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

The annual creative writing festival will feature readings from three published writers and workshops designed and created by them for attendees.

Angela Vietto, professor of English and chair of the English department, said entry to the festival is free for all students and $40 per person not attending a college or university.

At the festival, featured authors include creative nonfiction writer Barrie Borich, fiction writer Rion Scott and poet Lynnell Edwards, and all of them will read some of their work and lead the workshops, Vietto said.

A panel of editors will also be at the festival for students who are interested in learning about the publishing and editing side of writing, and there will be another reading, separate from the featured writers’, courtesy of students who attend, she said.

Vietto said she encourages her students and anyone else who is interested in writing to go to the festival because the educational value of it is huge.

“I always tell students who are interested in creative writing; It’s kind of like taking a creative writing course in a day,” she said. “(Attendees) are getting different workshops from different writers, we get to hear from editors, they get to do some writing exercises, so it’s a great day for folks who want to be writers.”

A great benefit for students is listening to work read from three authors who write in three different genres, Vietto said.

When written work from such distinct genres is introduced together, she said it sparks an interest in some people who had not given them much thought before.

This ignited intrigue gets people writing more frequently and differently, Vietto said.

“Writers need to be readers,” she said. “I can’t over-emphasize the importance of writers learning from different teachers, and so this is an opportunity for them to hear somebody who may work in a very different way on the same genre students might have been studying here at Eastern.”

Lunch and dinner are included in the registration, but students who would like to have lunch must pay an additional $10, she said.

According to Eastern’s newsletter, people can register by visiting the Lions in Winter website to purchase tickets, or they can go to the Doudna Fine Arts Center Box.

Logan Raschke can be reached at 581-2812 or at lrraschke@eiu.edu.