Featured Presenters

Ron Rash is a New York Times best-selling author of short fiction, poetry and many award-winning novels. He is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. His newest book, The Caretaker, was published in September 2023 by Doubleday and named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. This last book brings his body of work up to 21 books: 8 novels, 7 short story collections, 5 poetry collections, and 1 reader/miscellany. He has been awarded the O. Henry Prize three times, and his books have been published in 21 countries and translated into 17 languages. In fall 2024, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Hailed as “one of the great American authors at work today” (New York Times), Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena, in addition to The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. 

A son of Buncombe and Watauga County natives, Rash was raised in Boiling Springs North Carolina, and his family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700s. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

Read more about our keynote speaker here. 

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and was published as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day initiative. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. She’s a proud Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world.  Visit her website here. 

 

 

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. Her book of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry, is forthcoming from LSU Press in Spring 2026.She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American.

Currently, she is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay, released in January 2023 from the University of Arizona Press’s Camino del Sol series. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “a fresh and stunning debut.” The novel was shortlisted for the Chicago Review of Books prize, was a New York Public Library book of the day, and was one of Crimereads and Tor.com’s best horror novels of the year. His short-story collection Best Worst American was released in 2017 by Small Beer Press and won the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for debut speculative fiction. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including EPOCH, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Sunday Morning Transport, The Chicago Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, The Believer, NIGHTMARE, Huizache, Small Odysseys, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Ecotone, Shenandoah, Sudden Fiction Latino, and Norton's Flash Fiction America, and is forthcoming in in Something Followed Us Home: Tales of Latine Horror from Simon & Schuster/Primero Sueño. Find him online at fulmerford.com & on Bluesky at @fulmerford.com

 

Scott Honeycutt grew up in Virginia and Tennessee. He holds a PhD in American literature from Georgia State University and is a professor of English at East Tennessee State University. He has published numerous poems, including two chapbooks, This Diet of Flesh and Twelve Miles North of the Kentucky River. His new book, co-written with Kevin O’Donnell, Woodlands of the Mind, will be released by the University of Georgia Press in May. When Scott is not teaching, he spends his time creating hand-drawn maps and hiking the hills of Appalachia.

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Kevin O'Donnell has taught English at East Tennessee State University for more than 30 years. The courses he teaches include Advanced Composition, American Literature, Literary Nonfiction and Environmental Writing. He is the author of numerous publications over the years, including, with Helen Hollingsworth, Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia (U of Tennessee Press, 2004) and, with Scott Honeycutt, the forthcoming Woodlands of the Mind: Rambles through Campus Forests (U of Georgia Press, May 2026).

Ted Olson is a professor of Appalachian Studies at ETSU. A nine-time Grammy nominee as a music historian, he has edited volumes of literary work by Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, James Still, and Cesare Pavese. Olson is the author of three poetry collections: Breathing in Darkness (2006), Revelations (2012), and Blue Moon (2025).