Writers' Workshop
WORKSHOP FACULTY
Our renowned faculty provides rigorous instruction to participants in their selected genre and through special topic sessions, panels, and lectures.
Keynote
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels (Clay’s Quilt [2001], A Parchment of Leaves [2003], The Coal Tattoo [2005], Eli the Good [2009], Same Sun Here[2012], Southernmost [2018] and Lark Ascending [2022], which was a Booklist Editors’ Choice and is the winner of the 2023 Southern Book Prize and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award. In 2025 he will release two books: a poetry collection called All These Ghosts (September 9) and–under a slight pseudonym–a murder-mystery called Dead Man Blues (October 14).
In 2023 he was inducted as the Poet Laureate of Kentucky for 2023-2025 and became a Grammy finalist. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation. The same year he was named Appalachian of the Year in a nationwide poll.
GENRE SESSIONS
Charles Dodd White is the author of four novels, a story collection, and a book of essays. His work has appeared in several national publications and has been awarded fellowships from North Carolina and Tennessee. A recipient of the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian Literature, the Appalachian Book of the Year, and two IPPY medals, he teaches English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. His next novel, THE WORLD ITSELF, is forthcoming in 2027 from Regal House Publishing.
Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022), was named a best LGBTQ+ memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022, and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the New England Book Award, and the Weatherford Award. She lives in Boston.
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, and the Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University Bloomington. She also teaches in the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down, The Light Always Breaks, Homeward, and Untethered. House Repairs won the 2021 Alabama Library Association Poetry Award. When Stars Rain Down was a finalist for the 2021 Langum Prize, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. Homeward was shortlisted in 2024.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the 2021 Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012) was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in various publications including The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and Guernica. Carter is the 2024 recipient of Lambda Literary’s Duggins Prize for Outstanding Mid-Career LGBTQ Novelists, and he was also a finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, VCCA, and Hambidge artist residencies. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.
Christopher Rowe was born in Adair County, Kentucky, and lives there today. Neither of these facts are likely to change. He has been a finalist for every major award in the science fiction and fantasy fields and a few of the minor ones. His work has been published, reprinted, and translated around the world.
Kentucky native Bernard Clay grew up in Louisville. He has spent years developing a deep appreciation of the state’s unique natural and urban areas. Bernard earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work can be found in various journals and anthologies. He currently lives on Scorpion Hollow Farm in eastern Kentucky with his herbalist partner Lauren, founder of Resilient Roots, where he homesteads and continues writing. English Lit is his first book.
Dr. Raye Hendrix (she/they) is a writer from Alabama. Her debut poetry collection, What Good Is Heaven (2024), was selected to represent Alabama in the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series from Texas Review Press and is the winner of the Weatherford Award for Best Poetry About Appalachia (2024). Raye is also the author of two chapbooks and the winner of the Keene Prize for Literature (2019) and Patricia Aakhus Award (Southern Indiana Review, 2018). Their work appears in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. Raye is the editor of Dis/Connect: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press) and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Berea College.
Jesse Graves is the author of five poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, the forthcoming A Little Light in the Grave, and a book of prose, 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 in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poetry of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.
Holly Goddard Jones, a Kentucky native, is the author of four books of fiction, most recently ANTIPODES: STORIES, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at UNC Greensboro.
AFTERNOON SESSIONS
Wes Blake is the author of Pineville Trace—winner of the Etchings Press Book Prize, featured on Deep South Magazine’s Reading List, finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award, National Indie Excellence Award, and Feathered Quill Book Award —from Etchings Press, Univ. of Indianapolis. Pulitzer Prize finalist author Lee Martin called him a “writer to watch,” and SmokeLong Quarterly described his debut novel as an “utterly compelling read.” His novel Antenna was a semifinalist for the UNO (Univ. of New Orleans) Press Book Prize, and his creative nonfiction essay collection Hazelgreen and Other Haunts was a semifinalist for the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. His fiction, essays, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, storySouth, Appalachian Journal, Louisiana Literature Journal, Los Angeles Review, Book of Matches, Blood & Bourbon, and JMWW, among others. He holds an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Studio and also studied writing at UK under Gurney Norman and James Baker Hall. He grew up in eastern, central, and western Kentucky, and now lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, surrounded by his cats and the 100 trees he planted. Learn more at wesblake.com.
Jayne Moore Waldrop is the author of three children’s picture books, including Back to Our Nests (July 2026); She Remembered It All: The Art of Memory Painter Helen LaFrance, a 2025 IBPA Gold Medal winner; and A Journey in Color: The Art of Ellis Wilson, all from Shadelandhouse Modern Press. Her other books include Drowned Town (University Press of Kentucky/Fireside Industries), selected as a Great Group Reads book by the Women’s National Book Association; Retracing My Steps, a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Contest, and Pandemic Lent: A Season in Poetry (both from Finishing Line Press). Her work has also appeared in Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, Appalachian Review, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Women Speak, and other journals and magazines. She lives in Kentucky.
Jim Minick is the author or editor of eight books, including The Intimacy of Spoons (Semi-Finalist for the 2025 North American Poetry Book Award), Without Warning: The Tornado of Udall, Kansas (Kansas Notable Book Award, 2023, nonfiction), Fire Is Your Water (Finalist for the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, 2017), and The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family (Winner of the Southern Book of the Year from SIBA, 2010). His work has appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Orion, Shenandoah, Appalachian Journal, Wind, and The Sun, and his poem “I Dream a Bean” was picked by Claudia Emerson for permanent display at the Tysons Corner/Metrorail Station. Minick’s honors include the Thomas and Lillie Chaffin Award, the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, the Appalachian Writer in Residence for On the Same Page Festival, and the Fred Chappell Fellowship at UNC-Greensboro. He lives in the mountains of Virginia.
Denali Sai Nalamalapu (they/them) is the author of Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. They are a climate organizer and comic artist living in Southwest Virginia, originally from Southern Maine and Southern India.
Amy Wegener (she/her) is the Literary Director at Actors Theatre of Louisville, where her role supports a variety of artistic and administrative projects. Over a career that spans more than two decades with Actors Theatre and four years as Literary Manager at the Guthrie Theater, she has supported the curation, development, and production of new work and has served as a dramaturg on more than 100 plays, ranging from world premieres to reimagined classics. Amy was part of the selection process and dramaturgical team for 20 iterations of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, working with many wonderful playwrights and leading the literary department during that festival’s final decade. Other credits include projects with the Playwrights’ Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Great Plains Theatre Commons. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. from Northwestern University, and she is the co-editor of 21 published anthologies of plays.
Katerina Stoykova is the author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry (McFarland, 2024). Katerina is the founder and senior editor of Accents Publishing, as well as the creator of the Accents podcast on WUKY. Katerina is the 2025-2026 President of the Kentucky State Poetry Society.
Amanda Jo Slone is a writer and educator from Draffin Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, The Louisville Review, Still: The Journal, and several anthologies, including the forthcoming Testament: A Rural Anthology (Backwoods Literary Press). In addition to her publications, she brings years of experience mentoring writers and designing creative, interdisciplinary courses that connect story to vocation and place identity.
A native of upper East Tennessee, Jane Hicks is an award-winning poet and quilter. The Jesse Stuart Foundation published her first book, Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia in 2005. The book met with popular and critical acclaim, winning the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year prize. It was also nominated for the Weatherford Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association. Jane’s poetry has frequently appeared in journals and literary magazines in the southeast, notably Wind, Now & Then, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Asheville Poetry Review, and Shenandoah. Her poems have been anthologized in Migrants and Stowaways and Literary Lunch published by the Knoxville Writers Guild, Crossing Troublesome 25 years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop, Coal: A Poetry Anthology, We All Live Downstream: Writings About Mountaintop Removal, Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia, Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, and Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia. Her work appeared in an anthology of poetry with connections to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her “literary quilts” illustrate the works of playwright Jo Carson and novelists Sharyn McCrumb and Silas House. The art quilts have toured with these respective authors and were the subject of a feat in Blue Ridge Country Magazine in an issue devoted to arts in the region. Jane retired from Sullivan County, Tennessee schools after thirty years of teaching. Her second poetry book, published in the fall of 2014 by the University Press of Kentucky, is titled Driving with the Dead. It also won the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year (2015) and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award. Her critically acclaimed third book, The Safety of Small Things, was published by the University of Kentucky Press under Hindman’s Fireside Press imprint in early 2024. This book met with wide critical acclaim and was nominated for a number of awards. She has participated in the Appalachian Writers Workshop for over thirty years.
CRAFT LECTURES
Marianne Worthington is author of Water. Witness.Word. (Belle Point Press, 2026) and The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Salvation South, and Southern Humanities Review, among other places. She cofounded and was poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia (2009-2024). She grew up in East Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in Southeastern Kentucky.
George Ella Lyon is a celebrated poet, writer, and teacher whose work is deeply rooted in the landscape and voices of Appalachia. A native of Harlan, Kentucky, she has published in multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, memoir, and books for children. Her acclaimed collections include Many-Storied House, Back to the Light, and Voices of Justice: Poems About People Working for a Better World. Lyon served as Kentucky Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2016 and has received numerous honors for her contributions to literature and education. Through her writing and teaching, she continues to celebrate language, nurture creativity, and give voice to the stories of place and people that shape our shared world.
