While millions of people bought Kathryn Harrison’s memoir The Kiss, the Athens community can hear the author read her controversial work in person this weekend.

Harrison is one of five authors speaking at the Spring Literary Festival, which runs today through Friday.

Also speaking are essayist and fiction writer Thomas Glave, poet Tony Hoagland, and fiction writers Lee K. Abbott and Michael Griffith. Events are free and open to the public.

Griffith will speak in place of National Book Award nominee Edwidge Danticat, who canceled her readings yesterday because of an illness.

Even though it was feared that the festival would be eliminated through budget cuts last year, the event is now funded through Arts for Ohio and should go on in the future, said Kevin Haworth, coordinator of special programs for the English department at Ohio University.

The literary festival is an important and prestigious event, he said.

“Charles Simic came last year, and he’s now the poet laureate,” Haworth said. “We get writers at the top of the field.”Abbott, a novelist and professor at Ohio State University, accepted the invitation to speak at the festival because he values student input, he said.

“Students have a way of challenging your prejudices,” Abbott said. “I can walk into a room with an idea and then find myself obliged to re-examine things I thought were long settled.”

Organizers try to bring in the most diverse set of authors possible, Haworth said.

Hoagland is noted for accessible humor in his writing, while Glave’s work brings awareness to gay rights. Harrison writes about controversial topics like incest, but Abbott is known for descriptive fiction.

“We really want there to be something for everybody,” Haworth said.

The festival is important because it brings attention to the written word, which has been surpassed by Internet and movies as a leisure activity, Harrison said.

“I don’t know of anything else that gives me what writing and reading has,” she said. “It is my apparatus for understanding the world.”