Local authors held a literary festival to support the student protestors at the Vancouver Island University (VIU) Palestine Solidarity Encampment.
After three weeks since the encampment started, novelists, poets, playwrights, and journalists, took part in the Watermelon Seeds Festival of Literature on May 22. The festival is to demonstrate solidarity with the student protesters at the encampment
Warren Heiti, a professor at VIU who coordinated the festival, said the student protestors are the university’s moral and political leaders.
The festival held at the encampment showcased seven authors and three students who all read from their own materials or books or poems that went along with the festival’s mission.
This festival follows after an open letter from VIU staff and faculty was sent to the university on May 7 stating their concerns about how VIU responded to the start of the encampment.
