Instructors
Ashley Blooms
Ashley Blooms is the author of Every Bone a Prayer, which NPR says “bears within its pages striking beauty and strangeness in equal measure.” Her fiction has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, among others.
Courses:
May 2021 -Introduction to Speculative Fiction
Nickole Brown
Nickole Brown received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College and studied literature at Oxford University. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out in 2015.
Courses:
April 2021 -Re-Cognition & Re-Vision: Pushing the Boundaries of Poems
Gwenda Bond
Gwenda Bond is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels. Among others, they include the Lois Lane and Cirque American trilogies, and the first official Stranger Things novel, Suspicious Minds. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Locus Magazine, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Courses:
March 2021 – Introduction to Writing Young Adult Fiction
Silas House
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books. His writing often appears in The Atlantic and The New York Times. He has recently been published in Time, Ecotone, Garden and Gun, and many other places. He serves as the NEH Chair at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at the Spalding School of Writing.
Courses:
Fall 2020 – The Art of Observation
Ouita Michel
Ouita Michel is a six-time James Beard Foundation Award nominee, including nominations for Outstanding Restaurateur and Best Chef Southeast. Michel and her restaurants are regularly featured in local and national media, such as the New York Times, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Food Network, and the Cooking Channel. She was a guest judge on Bravo’s Top Chef series. Her first book is Just a Few Miles South: Timeless Recipes from Our Favorite Places.
Courses:
April 2021 – Just A Few Miles South: Recipes from Ouita Michel
Jenn Noble Shepherd
Jenn Noble Shepherd, living and creating in Hazard, Kentucky, is a proud Appalachian artist. She specializes in mixed media painting, but equally enjoys basketmaking, quilting, and and craft she has the opportunity to learn. Jenn has nearly ten years of experience in teaching various mediums in the classroom and community. Her works has been on display at the Mountain Arts Center, Appalachian Artisan Center, AppalShop, and is on the over of two published works.
Courses:
March 2021- Hand Stitching & Quilting
