Featured Presenters

Rita Dove served as US Poet Laureate from 1993–1995. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and the National Medal of Arts from President Obama—the only poet ever to receive both. Besides 29 honorary degrees, among them from Harvard and Yale, her honors include the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award, the American Academy of Arts & Letters’ 2021 Gold Medal in poetry, a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Bobbitt Prize for lifetime achievement from the Library of Congress, the 2023 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and a 2024 Leadership Award from the American Academy of Poets. Among her numerous books are Thomas and Beulah, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Sonata Mulattica, Collected Poems 1974-2004, and  most recently Playlist for the Apocalypse. Her play The Darker Face of the Earth was staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington and the National Theatre in London, and her song cycles with composers John Williams, Tania Leon, Richard Danielpour and others were performed at Tanglewood, Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in Washington. Rita Dove teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia. Read more about our keynote speaker here. 

George Singleton has published ten collections of stories, two novels, a book of writing advice, and a collection of essays. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Story, One Story, Playboy, the Georgia Review, Zoetrope, Subtropics, and elsewhere. His personal essays have appeared in Garden and Gun, Bark, Best American Food Writing, Oxford American, and elsewhere. He’s received a Pushcart, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he lives in South Carolina.

Catherine Pritchard Childress lives in the shadow of Roan Mountain in East Tennessee. She teaches writing and literature at Lees-McRae College where she serves as director of The Stephenson Center for Appalachian and Comparative Highland Studies.  Her poems have appeared in North American Review, The Cape Rock, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, Stone- boat, and drafthorse, among other journals. Her work has also been anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volumes VI and VII: Tennessee and North Carolina, and in Women Speak, Volumes VII and VIII. She is the author of the poetry collections Other (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Outside the Frame (Eastover Press 2023). 

Sarah Pinsker  is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, two novels, and one collection. Her work has won four Nebula Awards (Best Novel, A Song For A New Day; Best Novelette, "Our Lady of the Open Road," Best Novelette, "Two Truths And A Lie," Best Short Story, "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,"), two Hugo Awards ("Two Truths And a Lie" and "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather"), the Philip K Dick Award, the Locus Award, the Eugie Foster Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and been nominated for numerous Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Her fiction has been published translated into almost a dozen languages and published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny and in many anthologies and year's bests. 

Danielle Byington is an educator, artist, and author, as well as a PhD student at University of Jaén, Spain. Her poetry has been published in various outlets and her first poetry chapbook, The Absurdity of Origins, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2019. She is also a visual artist whose work has been exhibited and published internationally. Byington enjoys life with her Shakespearean better half and three ridiculous cats.

 

 

Lydia Copeland Gwyn is a librarian at East Tennessee State University. Her fiction, essays, and prose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2024, The Florida Review, F(r)iction, Gastropoda, Elm Leaves Journal, and others. She is the author of the flash fiction collections You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). She lives in Watauga, TN with her husband, son, and daughter.