Recapping the 2025 Neustadt Lit Fest

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The 2025 Neustadt Lit Fest, hosted by World Literature Today, took place on the University of Oklahoma (OU) campus October 20–22. Eight public events—featuring more than two dozen writers, dancers, musicians, and scholars—attracted more than a thousand attendees, including several hundred students from OU, the Norman Public Schools, and Colorado Academy.

An opening ceremony to welcome NSK Prize laureate Cherie Dimaline kicked off day one of the festival, featuring an intertribal round dance featuring OU students, organized by Asa Samuels.

The following morning, the nine writers and translators serving as jury members for the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature convened to deliberate and vote on their nominees. That evening, Kathy Neustadt formally announced Ibrahim Nasrallah as the twenty-ninth laureate of the prize at a reception in the Oklahoma Memorial Union. (Nasrallah will headline the lit fest in October 2026, when he will visit campus to formally receive the award.) The jurors also read from their own works and signed books, provided throughout the lit fest by Norman’s Native-owned Green Feather Book Company.

Day two also featured a roundtable discussion of Dimaline’s work with OU Native American Studies faculty Laura Harjo and Kimberly Wieser-Weryackwe, moderated by Dustin Tahmahkera, followed by Q&A with the audience.

On day three, the festival continued with the premiere of a dance adaptation of Dimaline’s best-selling novel, The Marrow Thieves; her keynote, “From Folklore to Dystopia: We’re Always Writing the Future”; a translation workshop for OU students taught by Elisabeth Jaquette; and the NSK Prize ceremony. The dance performance, co-sponsored by the Norman Arts Council and the OU School of Dance, was choreographed by MFA student Alma Borges, with original music by Ioannis Andriotis, costumes by Cesia Farfán, and performed by OU students from Contemporary Dance Oklahoma.

During the gala evening, OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. offered a video greeting, and a powwow exhibition dance featured student drummers, dancers, and singers representing the Cherokee, Cheyenne/Arapaho, Choctaw, Comanche, Creek, Kiowa, Mohegan, Osage, Ponca, and Seminole tribal nations. After receiving the NSK silver medallion and prize certificate from the Neustadt sisters, Dimaline offered moving acceptance remarks (see page 00) and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Visit neustadtprize.org to learn more about the 2025 lit fest, and check out WLT’s YouTube channel to watch archived videos from all three days.