Starting festival has given students real-world lessons in arts management.
by Duane Bonifer
COLUMBIA, KY. (06/17/2026) For a relatively young academic program, the Lindsey Wilson University arts administration program is already making a big splash.
Its latest contribution will take center stage on June 19-20 when the inaugural Mark Twain Storytelling Festival is held on campus. The event — which celebrates Mark Twain’s ancestral ties to Columbia — is the product of a class project created in the 2025 fall semester by students in the university’s two-year-old arts administration major.
After the students invited Columbia Mayor Pamela Hoots to hear their presentation on starting a storytelling festival to honor one of Columbia’s famous cousins, the class project shortly became the region’s latest summer festival.
The dates June 19-20 were selected because Twain’s mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, was born on June 18, 1803, in Columbia. Shortly after she married John Marshall Clemens in May 1823 in Columbia, the couple moved to Tennessee before heading to Missouri, where Samuel Clemens, their sixth child, was born in 1835. Nearly three decades later, Samuel would start to publish his writings under the pen name Mark Twain.
The Lindsey Wilson students were inspired to propose a storytelling festival connected to Mark Twain after theatre professor Robert Brock had them study how the arts helped transform Paducah, Kentucky.
“The arts helped make Paducah a destination city, so part of the assignment was for them to explore how we could do the same thing for Columbia,” said Brock. “I mentioned Columbia’s connection to Mark Twain, so I thought we could start there. The students really did a great job taking the idea and running with it.”
Reconnecting Mark Twain to the area
Lindsey Wilson spring graduate Sabrina Ruiz of Louisville, Kentucky, said that celebrating Twain’s connection to Columbia made the project very attractive to her.
“It surprised me how many people didn’t know Mark Twain’s ties to Columbia,” said Ruiz, who graduated with a double major in arts administration and theatre and is headed to graduate school in the fall at Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City. “It was really cool to see our idea go from a classroom project to a real thing.”
While taking the festival from the blackboard to reality, Ruiz has maintained a working binder that includes to-do lists and schedules, along with names of prospective vendors.
“We’ve learned how to run a business operation and the importance of creating a space for the arts,” said Ruiz. “We’ve had to think about marketing, communicating with vendors, creating a schedule, talking to sponsors and other things involved with preparation.”
Leif Honaker ’27, an arts administration major from Columbia, created the festival’s graphic identity and other support material for the weekend.
“My biggest lesson from all of this is how my art can be used by other people to promote things,” said Honaker. “Working on that has made me more confident in my ability.”
Spring graduate Gage Carnes of Jamestown, Kentucky, said that working on the festival “has given me an understanding of both sides of an event” — the storytelling performances that will entertain guests as well as the business decisions made to create and sustain the weekend festival.
“Working on it has let me see all the sides required to put it all together and how to connect everything to create one unified project,” he said.
Carnes hopes the inaugural year of the Mark Twain Storytelling Festival will help lay the foundation for an annual celebration that will evolve into a major artistic event in the region.
“I love the idea of it getting bigger every year,” said Carnes. “And maybe it’s something that starts in Columbia but reaches out to the entire southcentral region of the state.”
Ruiz said helping take the festival from class project to community event is one reason why she enjoyed Lindsey Wilson’s arts administration major.
“Lindsey has taught me that theatre is not just about the acting, there’s all this other work and small details that need to get done,” she said. “Things don’t magically appear. Someone has to figure it out.”
And Brock said bringing the Mark Twain Storytelling Festival to life is another reminder how studying the fine arts provides students excellent preparation for the job market. “I had a friend in college say that theatre
was the last bastion of free enterprise in the world because you can just start something, and that’s what’s happened,” he said.
Students in a Lindsey Wilson University arts administration class taught by theatre professor Robert Brock helped conceive the idea for the Mark Twain Storytelling Festival, which will be held June 19-20 at the university. Pictured, from left, are some of the students and alumni who have worked on the festival: Brandon Grider ’28 of Columbia; Leif Honaker ’27 of Columbia; Brock; theatre graduate assistant Kassidy Phelps ’24; Gage Carnes ’26 of Jamestown, Kentucky; Sabrina Ruiz ’26 of Louisville, Kentucky; and Tezon Mitchell ’27 of Greensburg, Kentucky.
Lindsey Wilson University is a vibrant liberal arts university in Columbia, Kentucky. Founded in 1903 and affiliated with The United Methodist Church, the mission of Lindsey Wilson is to serve the educational needs of students by providing a living-learning environment within an atmosphere of active caring and Christian concern where every student, every day, learns and grows and feels like a real human being. Lindsey Wilson offers 30 undergraduate majors, five graduate programs and a doctoral program. The university’s 29 intercollegiate varsity athletic teams have won more than 120 team and individual national championships.
(Duane Bonifer – Lindsey Wilson University)