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| Color Coded Key for Bio Backgrounds: |
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The 2008 Authors in Alphabetical Order
( learn a bit about the authors and visit their websites for more info* ) |
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Suzanne Adair (historical
novelist focusing women’s roles) Adair is the nom de plume for Suzanne Williams, a native Floridian who currently lives with her family in North Carolina. She grew up intrigued by stories of suspense and high adventure, Spanish St. Augustine, and the South's role in the Revolutionary War. After visiting the ruins of colonial-era Ft. Frederica on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, she began writing Paper Woman, the first book of her series and the recipient of the 2007 Patrick D. Smith Literature Award from the Florida Historical Society. She enjoys participating in living history to commemorate events from the Southern Theater of the Revolutionary War -- a hobby that helps her depict colonial life in writing. More Information |
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| Sarah Addison Allen (novelist) Allen was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, and continues to live there. Garden Spells, her first novel, debuted at #7 on the New York Times Bestsellers List and made the USA Today, Publisher's Weekly, Wall Street Journal and Book Sense bestseller lists. Her second novel The Sugar Queen is due out in May 2008 from Bantam. More Information |
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| John
Alger |
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Marlin Barton (novelist) Barton's short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review and The American Literary Review. "Jeremiah's Road," a story from his first collection The Dry Well was included in Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards. Barton was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2006, and received the Andrew Lytle Prize in 1995. Barton's debut novel A Broken Thing was published in 2003. A short story collection, Dancing by the River came out in 2005. Barton lives in Montgomery with his wife Rhonda. He is assistant director of the "Writing Our Stories" project, a program for juvenile offenders. More Information |
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| Tamara
Baxter (poet, editor,
novelist)
Register Workshop Description Baxter's collection of fiction, Rock Big and Sing Loud won the Morehead State and Jesse Stuart Foundation's First Author's Award for Fiction. Her short fiction, poetry, and essays have been widely published in journals such as Now & Then, Artemis, Appalachian Heritage, Wellspring, and in anthologies such as the 2000 O. Henry Awards Anthology, and The Night Shade Nightstand Reader, edited by Fred Chappell. Baxter has received many awards, including the Harriette Arnow Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, a Leslie Garrett Award in fiction, and theNational Rose Post Award for creative non-fiction for her essay, "Some Living Room." She is an Associate Professor of English at Northeast State Community College where she teaches literature and creative writing, and is an editor for the literary magazine, Echoes & Images. |
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Danny
Bernstein (hiker, writer) Bernstein started the website, Hiker to Hiker, after being active in outdoor groups for many years. She is an avid hiker, an active member of the Carolina Mountain Club (CMC) and a life member of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. She has hiked the whole Appalachian Trail and completed the South Beyond 6000, all the 6,000 foot mountains in the Southern Appalachians. I have hiked internationally, including Europe, Australia and New Zealand. I was a college professor for many years before I switched careers. Now when I'm not hiking, I write about the outdoors. My book, Hiking the Carolina Mountains was published in April 2007. More Information |
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| Jeff
Biggers (radio correspondent, writer, educator) Biggers has worked as a writer,educator, radio correspondent, and community organizer across the United States, Europe, India and Mexico. His award-winning stories have appeared on NPR, PRI, and in scores of travel, literary and music magazines, and national and foreign newspapers. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and for Pacific News Service national syndication. He is the author of In The Sierra Madre and The United States of Appalachia. His work has been the recipient of an American Book Award. More Information |
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Sallie
Bissell Bissell, a Nashville native, is the author of four novels of suspense featuring the half-Cherokee prosecutor, Mary Crow. The first two novels, In The Forest of Harm and A Darker Justice received critical acclaim from Kirkus Review and Publisher's Weekly, among others. People Magazine called In The Forest of Harm a “top-notch thriller” while the Los Angeles Times dubbed A Darker Justice one of the Ten Best Mysteries of 2002. Her third and forth novels are Call The Devil By His Oldest Name (2004) and Legacy of Masks (2005). Sallie currently lives near Asheville, North Carolina. More Information |
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John
Buchanan (historian)
Buchanan is an historian who was an archivist at Cornell University and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. During his nearly three decades on the staff of the museum he was, for twenty-two years, chief registrar in charge of worldwide art movements. He is the author of the highly regarded histories The Road to Guilford Courthouse, The Road to Valley Forge and Jackson’s Way. He is at work on The Road to Charles Town, a forthcoming account of the final phases of the Revolutionary War in the South. He lives with his wife in New York City. |
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Gerald
Carbone (historian, biographer)
Carbone is the author of the forthcoming book Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution. Carbone has been recognized as an expert on the life of Nathanael Greene by various historical societies. He has won two of American journalism's most prestigious prizes--the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. He lives in Warwick, RI. |
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| Gary Carden (playwright,
storyteller) Carden’s latest success, a one-man-show entitled The Prince of Dark Corners (performed by Milton Higgins of Burnsville) has been filmed by Heritage Films (filmmaker, Neal Hutcheson) and is scheduled for broadcast by PBS. Carden’s other dramatic works include The Raindrop Waltz and a series of dramatic monologues, including Nance Dude, Birdell and Coy. Mason Jars in the Flood received the Appalachian Writers Association Award for Book of the Year (200l) and his video, “Blow the Tannery Whistle” filmed by Tom Davenport has become a storytelling classic. He is a 2006 recipient of the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award from the NC Folklore Society. More Information |
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Judy Carson | |||||||||||
| Fred
Chappell (poet, novelist) Keynote Speaker at Saturday Banquet Register Born near Candler, Chappel has produced almost thirty volumes of literature. Perhaps his most ambitious accomplishment has been four poetry collections paired with four novels, each based on one of the four elements -- earth, air, fire, and water -- and all reflecting Chappell's Appalachian roots as he examines the core of human experience: love, community, and mortality. In 1997, following the tenure of Sam Ragan, Chappell's remarkable versatility and skill earned him the title of North Carolina Poet Laureate. As professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Chappell has mentored several of our state's fine poets, including Sarah Lindsay, Pulitzer-prize winner Claudia Emerson, and Kathryn Stripling Byer. His excellence in teaching was recognized by the statewide O. Max Gardner Award. Other honors include the Bollingen Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Now retired from teaching, he lives in Greensboro with his wife Susan, and continues to compose poetry, which he calls "the noblest secular endeavor that the human mind undertakes." |
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Jim Clark
(poet,
musician, playwright, professor, editor) He has published Notions: A Jim Clark Miscellany, two books of poems Dancing on Canaan's Ruins, and Handiwork, and has edited Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece. His first full-lenght play The Girl with the Faraway Eye, was given a public staged reading at The Portland Actors Conservatory Theatre, Portland, OR. He also has several CDs of poems and Appalachian folk music: Buried Land, The Near Myths, and Words to Burn. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and in journals and magazines such as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Now and Then, and Rolling Stone. He lives in Wilson, North Carolina, where he is Professor of Southern Literature, Writer-in-Residence at Barton College, and an editor of Crucible. His readings often include music and songs performed on the guitar, banjo, autoharp, and mountain dulcimer. More Information |
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| Dr. Dennis
Conrad (historian)
Conrad works as a historian at the early history branch of the Naval Historical Center in Washington, DC. There he helps edit the Naval Documents of the American Revolution series. He has served as editor and project director of the monumental Papers of General Nathanael Greene. He directed the completion of volumes 7 through 12 of that series covering Greene’s campaigns in the South. He also served as contributing editor for volume 13. The monumental Greene papers are recognized for having set a new standard for annotated documentary collections. Gen. Greene was also the subject of Conrad’s doctoral dissertation at Duke University. |
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| Carol Conrad (education specialist with the National
Archives) Conrad is an Education Specialist with the National Archives. She was a contributor to the Archivist-in-Training Kit, an educational tool for elementary and middle school classrooms. This book presents the National Archives in an exciting, kid-friendly way. More Information about the National Archives |
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| Abigail
DeWitt (novelist,
writing instructor, short story writer) Register DeWitt has been teaching creative writing for twenty years. She has led workshops all over the U.S. and in Europe, and has taught at the Duke Writers' Workshop, Harvard University Summer School, Appalachian State University and UNC-Asheville. A firm believer that everyone has a story to tell, Abigail enjoys working with both beginning and advanced students. She has taught published authors as well as those who have never written, and has learned immeasurably from both. The recipient of several awards and fellowships, she is the author of the novel, Lili, as well as many short stories. |
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| Myrtle Driver Driver, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, has translated Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons: Removal (Tsogadu Nvdo: Tsigegvwovdisgei), the inaugural publication of the Yonaguska Literature Initiative from the Museum of the Cherokee Indian Press. She has also translated “Thirteen Moons” by Charles Frazier, frequently appearing with Frazier at readings in both English and Cherokee. |
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Barbara Duncan (historian,
educator, writer, storyteller) Duncan is the author of Origins of the Milky Way and other living stories of the Cherokee. She was the editor of Living Stories of the Cherokee (Winner of a 1999 Storytelling World Award and Winner of the 1998 Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, Western North Carolina Historical Association) and coauthor of the Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook. Dr. Barbara R. Duncan is Education Director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina. |
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| Pamela Duncan
(novelist) Duncan was born in Asheville and raised in Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Shelby, North Carolina, and currently lives in Saxapahaw, NC. She holds an MA in English/Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Her first novel, Moon Women, was a Southeastern Booksellers Association (now Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award Finalist, and her second novel, Plant Life, won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of the 2007 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South, awarded by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her third novel, The Big Beautiful, was published in March 2007. More Information |
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John Ehle (novelist) Ehle was raised in Asheville and sets many of his books in North Carolina. He has written 11 works of fiction including Move Over, Mountain, Winter People, The Journey of August King, Widow's Trial and The Road (which recounts building the railroad across the Appalachian mountains). His most recent book of non-fiction is Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Ehle has received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Thomas Wolfe Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction, and he is a five-time winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. |
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| Elizabeth
Ellison (artist/illustrator) Elizabeth Ellison is a watercolorist-papermaker who has a gallery-studio in Bryson City, NC. Ellison's pen-and-ink drawings and watercolor washes long have graced the work of her husband, writer/naturalist George Ellison, and others. Publishing venues include The Asheville Citizen-Times, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Outdoor Traveler, Friends of Wildlife, High Vistas, and Chinquapin. In September of 2006, The History Press (Charleston, SC) published Blue Ridge Nature Journal: Reflections on the Appalachians in Essays and Art by George and Elizabeth Ellison. The Ellisons are currently editing and illustrating a two-volume collection titled High Vistas: An Anthology of Nature and Descriptive Writing from Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Volume I (1540-1900) will be published by the History Press in spring 2008. More Information |
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George
Ellison (naturalist,
columnist) Ellison, who resides in Bryson City, NC, wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. He writes a “Nature Journal” column for the Asheville Citizen-Times and a regional history “Back Then” column for Smoky Mountain News. A selection of his "Back Then" columns published in 2005 by The History Press in Charleston, SC, as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. The Ellisons are currently editing and illustrating a two-volume collection titled High Vistas: An Anthology of Nature and Descriptive Writing from Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Volume I (1540-1900) will be published by the History Press in spring 2008; volume II (1901-2007) in spring 2009. More Information |
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Georgann Eubanks (poet, musician,
reviewer, editor) Eubanks has published short stories, poems, reviews, and profiles in many magazines and journals including The Washington Monthly, Oxford American, Bellingham Review, Southern Review, Duke Magazine, Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Appalachian Heritage, and North American Review. She is a North Carolina Arts Council Literary Fellowship winner (1985), recipient of a regional Emmy for songwriting (2001), and has been Director of the Duke University Writers' Workshop since 1989. Eubanks' current writing project is the creation of a series of literary guidebooks commissioned by the NC Arts Council and published by UNC Press. The first of the the guidebooks is Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains. More Information |
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| Alan Gratz (teen
novelist) In addition to writing plays, magazine articles, and a few episodes of A&E's City Confidential, Gratz has taught catapult-building to middle-schoolers, and written more than 6,000 radio commercials. Gratz is the author of one of the ALA's 2007 Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, Samurai Shortstop (Dial 2006), and Something Rotten (Dial 2007), a contemporary young adult murder mystery based on "Hamlet." He is currently at work on a sequel, Something Wicked (Dial 2008), and a middle-grade novel about family, baseball, and American history, called The Brooklyn Nine (Dial 2009). He now lives with his wife Wendi and his daughter Jo in the high country of Western North Carolina. More Information |
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Anthony
Grooms (poet,
novelist,
educator) Grooms is a writer and arts administrator who is well known for his work in organizing arts events and for his support and encouragement of other writers. Grooms graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1978 with a B.A. in theatre and speech. Later he studied at George Mason University, where he developed a professional interest in creative writing, and graduated in 1984 with a master of fine arts in English. Grooms is the author of a collection of poetry, Ice Poems (1988), a collection of stories, Trouble No More (1995), and a novel, Bombingham (2001). Trouble No More was named The 2006 Book ALL GEORGIA READS by the Georgia Center for the Book, a project similar to the Western North Carolina Together We Read program. It also won the Lillian Smith Award, the South's oldest literary honor. |
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| Michael Joslin (writer, historian, photographer,
professor) Joslin grew up in the Southeast, living from Northern Virginia to Key West, Florida, as his father served in the Navy. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of South Carolina in 1977. Dr. Joslin joined the faculty at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, NC in 1989. He teaches literature, writing, and photography. In addition to his teaching, writing, and hours of taking photographs, Joslin has his farm chores. Highland Handcrafters: Appalachian Craftspeople (Parkway Publishers 2006) |
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Mark Kneece (graphic
novelist) Kneece published his first comic story in Alien Worlds in 1987. His credits include a story arc for Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and a stint as the writer of Tarzan for the syndicated comic strip. He co-authored The Bristol Board Jungle (NBM Publishing) with Bob Pendarvis in 2003. The novel is based on his experience as a sequential art teacher. Kneece also wrote a graphic novel entitled Trailers which was nominated for a YALSA Award. Most recently Kneece adapted 8 episodes of the Twilight Zone television series to graphic novel format for Walker Books. Kneece came to Savannah College of Art and Design in 1993 to teach writing in the sequential art department. He has lived in Savannah ever since. |
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| Catherine Landis (novelist,
journalist) Landis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in Chattanooga. She graduated from high school in 1974 and went to Davidson College in North Carolina, graduating receiving her BA in English in 1978. She worked in the media for several years, first at a newspaper and later at a television station. During these time periods Landis wrote short stories, one of which won the Leslie Garrett Award from the Writer’s Guild. In 1995, she started a novel, Some Days There’s Pie, which was published in 2002. Her second novel, Harvest, was released in late 2004. More Information |
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Vicki
Lane (novelist)
Register
Workshop Description Vicki Lane, author of Signs in the Blood (Dell 2005), Art's Blood (Dell 2006), Old Wounds (Dell 2007, a Book Sense Notable, nominated for 2008 SIBA Book Award for fiction), and In a Dark Season (Dell 2008), lives with her family on a mountain farm in North Carolina. She is at work on a stand-alone which will be published by Bantam Dell in 2009. More Information |
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Dorianne
Laux Register
Workshop Description |
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| Kathi Smith
Littlejohn (storyteller) Littlejohn, a Cherokee of the Eastern Band, is a contributor to Living Stories of the Cherokee, Winner of a 1999 Storytelling World Award and Winner of the 1998 Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, Western North Carolina Historical Association. She was born and grew up in Cherokee, NC. As a teenager, she worked as a guide at the Oconaluftee Indian Village and Living History Museum. On days when the weather was bad and tour groups few, the older workers would sit and tell their traditional stories to the younger Cherokee guides. Her storytelling style has been described as dramatic and entertaining, with lots of dialogue, expressive voices, and questions to engage her audiences. |
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| Leroy
Littlejohn (storyteller) Leroy Littlejohn is an oral Cherokee storyteller. During live performances, he translates into Cherokee the traditional stories which are told in English by his wife Kathi. |
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Myra
MacPherson (journalist,
biographer) Her most recent book "All Governments Lie!":The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006. (It was recently announced as a finalist in the PEN USA Literary Awards, a top ten biography for 2006-2007 Book List and a Best Book of 2006 by The Boston Globe and The Rocky Mountain News.) MacPherson is the author of three previous books, including the Vietnam War classic Long Time Passing. She was a highly regarded journalist at the Washington Post for many years, and has also written for the New York Times and numerous magazines, including Vanity Fair. She lives in Palm Desert, California, and Washington, D.C. |
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| Joanne
Mauldin (editor,
biographer) Mauldin is an independent scholar and author of Thomas Wolfe When Do the Atrocities Begin?. She began her Wofle Studies in 1982. She is currently working on Wolfe's unpublished manuscript, "The Return of the Prodigal," about the author's first visit to Yancey County and his final visit to Asheville in 1937. Her articles have appeared in Southern Exposure, The Thomas Wolfe Review, and Pembroke Magazine. She is the owner of Levelheaded Editing Services. (pictured with her is Thomas Woof) |
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Joe Millar
(poet)
Register
Workshop Description Millar's writing includes two books of poetry, Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press 2001) and Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press 2006), as well as two chapbooks, "Slow Dancer" and "Midlife: (Passionate Lives: Eight Autobiographical Poem Cycles)." In 1995, Millar was awarded first place in the Montalvo Biennial Poetry Competition, and won second place in the National Writers Union competition, judged by Philip Levine. He is the recipient of a 2003 NEA Poetry Fellowship.His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner. He now teaches writing at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. He is married to poet Dorianne Laux. |
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| Karen
Hokanson Miller (educator,
children's novelist) Protesting “There’s nothing to read,” Karen Miller’s 6th grade students convinced her to write a book just for them. "Everyone likes monsters," they told her. But there weren’t any books about real monsters. So Miller began a six year study of undiscovered beasts. Her first book, Monsters, Shapeshifters and Water Beasts, will be published by Henry Holt in spring 2007. A teacher, literature consultant, bookseller and mother of four, Karen Miller lives in Burnsville, North Carolina with her husband, Bob and dog Lucy. She has four adult children, aged 22-31 years old. More Information |
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Robert
Morgan (novelist,
poet) Morgan is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel Gap Creek, an Oprah Book Club selection in 2000 and winner of the Southern Book Award for fiction. Morgan has published five books of fiction, including The Truest Pleasure, and Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution.. He has published nine volumes of poetry and has published poems in many magazines. Additional awards and honors include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the James G. Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His book Boone is the 2008 Together We Read selection. More Information |
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Rob Neufeld
(journalist, editor, writer, advocate of
WNC literature) Rob Neufeld is the book critic and local history feature writer for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He is the editor The Making of a Writer: The Journals of Gail Godwin (Random House 2006); and the author of A Popular History of Western North Carolina (History Press 2007). He is also the director of Together We Read, western North Carolina’s 21-county reading, discussion, and heritage program, now in its sixth year. He is an experienced lecturer, performer, and discussion moderator. He has been studying and writing about local history all his adult life. His book Asheville's River Arts District will be published by Arcadia in July 2008. More Information |
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Troy Wayne Poteete (historian) Poteet, an enrolled member of the Cherokee nation, is an oral historian. He received his J. D. degree in May 2001 from the University of Tulsa-College of Law. He currently serves on the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court. He was a founding member of the National Trail of Tears Association and served on the National Park Service Trail of Tears Advisory Council as an appointee of the governor of Oklahoma. |
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| Charles
F. Price (historical
novelist) Price has published four novels to date: Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War, Freedom's Altar, (1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award), The Cock's Spur (Independent Publisher's 2001 Book Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Books of the Year and Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award) and Where the Water-Dogs Laughed. One of the chief characters in his new Revolutionary War novel Nor the Battle to the Strong is a maternal ancestor who served in the Continental Army. Nor the Battle to the Strong is being released July 4, 2008 from Frederic C. Beil Publisher of Savannah, GA. He currently lives in Yancey County. More Information |
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Ron Rash (poet,
novelist) Rash is the author of six books: The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth (short stories), Casualties (short stories), Eureka Mill (poetry), and Among the Believers (poetry), Raising the Dead (poetry), One Foot in Eden (novel) and Saints at the River (novel) and The World Made Straight (novel). Rash is a past winner of an NEA Poetry Fellowship. One Foot in Eden received the Appalachian Book of the Year award and Foreword Magazine's Gold Medal in Literary Fiction. Saints at the River was the 2006 Together We Read book. His new novel Serena is due out in October 2008. More Information |
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| Rose Senehi Senehi is noted for weaving environmental themes into her plots. In the Shadows of Chimney Rock was inspired by her love of the Western North Carolina mountains where she has a home. In her last novel, Pelican Watch, she drew upon her love of the people on the South Carolina Coast who are fighting to preserve the nesting grounds of the Loggerhead turtle. She moved to the South from Upstate New York in 1996. Her first novel, Shadows in the Grass, was published in 2001, her second, Windfall, in 2002, and her third, Pelican Watch, in 2006. Senehi was a featured author at the 2007 Readers in the Rockys Symposium in Crested Butte, Colorado, and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, in 2006 and 2007. More Information |
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Timothy
Silver (professor,
environmental scholar, historian) Silver is professor of history at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. His book Mount Mitchell & the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America (2003) earned him the Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, given by the Southern Environmental Law Center in the book category (2004) and and the Ragan Old North State Award of the North Carlonina Literary and Historical Association for the year's best work of non-fiction (2003) among other awards. His previous publications include A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. More Information |
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| Peggy Poe Stern Peggy Poe Stern is a native of North Carolina, born and raised in Ashe County and living in Foscoe for the past thirty-four years. Her greatest pleasure lies in writing about her beloved mountains and their inhabitants. She studied creative writing at ASU, UNCA, NCSU, and CCC. Since 2003, she has completed 10 novels including Tamarack, When Robin’s Weep, The Hills of Home, Mountain Splendor, Blood Moon Rising, Above All, and Joppa. She has also written Mountain Talk and To Everything There is a Season. Her eleventh novel, Hillbilly should be released in the fall of 2008. When asked about her prolific writing, she says: “Honey, I’m just getting warmed up.” More Information |
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Neal Thompson
(freelance journalist, writer, writing
professor) Thompson began his award-winning journalism career as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For the next 15 years, he worked up and down the East Coast - specializing in profiles, narratives and investigations - at such papers as the Roanoke Times & World-News in southwest Virginia, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Bergen Record in northern New Jersey. At the Baltimore Sun he covered the military and began researching his book Light This Candle. Other published books are Driving with the Devil and Hurrican Season: A Coach, His Team, and Their Triumph in the Time of Katrina (soon to become an HBO film). As a freelance journalist, he has written for numerous national publications: Outside, Esquire, the Washington Post Magazine, and Christian Science Monitor. Thompson teaches creative non-fiction at the University of North Carolina-Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program. More Information |
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Kevin
Watson (publisher, writer) Watson is co-owner and founding editor of Press 53. His short stories have appeared in ART Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Rose & Thorn Literary E-zine, and others. His short story "Sunny Side Up" won the 2002 OutRider Press/TallGrass Writers' Guild short fiction contest and appeared in the 2002 anthology TAKE TWO—THEY'RE SMALL. Prior to moving to Winston-Salem, NC, in 1997, Kevin spent ten years in Nashville, TN, as a songwriter, writing primarily for Crosswinds Music and Maypop Music, the publishing house for the band Alabama. He has shared the stage with Garth Brooks, Bill Monroe, Holly Dunn, Mary Chapin Carpenter and others. More Information |
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Barbara Webster (quilter,
editor) Since moving to Burnsville, Webster has had a book published about quiltmaking, and now is Executive Director of Quilt Trails of Western North Carolina. This project is a heritage project, focused on capturing the history of both Yancey and Mitchell counties. Each quilt block that goes up has a story behind it. She has been coordinating efforts by various local writers to capture these stories, and is editor and publisher of a newsletter every other month about the project. A book of the stories is in the works, and interim publications are coming out to meet the growing curiosity of the local community and the touring public. More Information |
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| Seabrook
Wilkinson (poet,
historian,
educator, literary critic)
Wilkinson’s connections with Charleston and the Carolina Lowcountry go back to 1670. Most of his education was far afield, at Harvard (A.B., History of Art) and then Oxford (B.A., M.A., Theology). He remained in Britain to work in another ancestral city, Edinburgh, as Head of English at Fettes College. As Charlestonians tend to do, he came home to roost, and while teaching at local colleges began to ascend the Ph.D. salmon-leap, whose top rung he is now approaching. His published criticism ranges from Marlowe to Frost. After decades of scrutinizing the poems of others, he began to write his own again; A Local Habitation was released in 2008. |
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Susan Woodring (short
story writer, novelist) Woodring grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, among other midwest states. Upon graduating from Western Carolina University, she spent a year teaching in Vologda, Russia before moving to the foothills of North Carolina to teach middle school. Susan is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. She is the author of one novel, The Traveling Disease. Her short fiction has earned many honors, including the 2006 Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Fiction Award and the 2006 Isotope Editor’s Prize. Her work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Yemassee, Ballyhoo Stories, The William and Mary Review, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, Passages North, and Surreal South (Press 53). Susan currently lives, writes, and home-schools her two children in Drexel, North Carolina. More Information |
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The ideas and opinions expressed by authors at the Carolina Mountains
Literary Festival or on their web sites linked to from our web page are
not necessarily those of or endorsed by the Carolina Mountains Literary
Festival. |