Contact Us

Meet our team! If you see us at a Bert C. Bach Literary Event, please come up and say hello.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments about our literary events or this website. 

Dr. Jesse Graves 

Director

gravesj@etsu.edu

Jesse Graves grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain (co-authored with William Wright), and Merciful Days, and a collection of essays, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, as well as two Weatherford Awards from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poems of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.

Lacy Snapp

Assistant Director

snapplc@etsu.edu 

Lacy Snapp is a poet, professor, and woodworking artist in East Tennessee where they plan university and community-based literary events. They serve as the Assistant Director of the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative at ETSU, Poetry Co-Editor of Appalachian Places, and board member of the Johnson City Poets Collective. They hold a MA in English from ETSU (2019) and an MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from VCFA (2023). They were awarded the 2025 inaugural Tammy “Tambone” Clemons Visionary Award from the Appalachian Studies Association for their dedication to storytelling and activism that uplifts Appalachian voices. Their first chapbook which connected qualities of trees to familial memories, Shadows on Wood, was published in 2021 (Finishing Line Press). Their work (poetry, nonfiction, interviews, and book reviews) appears in About Place Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, Salvation South, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain Review, Cutthroat, and multiple Women of Appalachia Project’s Women Speak anthologies, among others. 

Printed material related to the festival should go to the following address:

Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative
Attn: Dr. Jesse Graves 
c/o ETSU Department of Literature and Language
P. O. Box 70683
Johnson City, TN 37614

One can also contact the ETSU Literature and Language Department by phoning (423) 439-4339.