Writers' Workshop
WORKSHOP FACULTY
Our renowned faculty provides rigorous instruction to participants in their selected genre and through special topic sessions, panels, and lectures.
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Keynote
Multidisciplinary artist and educator, Frank X Walker, is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. He is the author of the children’s book, A is for Affrilachia, editor of two anthologies, and has written thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and his latest, Load In Nine Times. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. He serves as Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.
A published poet, Dr. Nazario y Colón has contributed to numerous journals and anthologies and is the author of two full collections and one chapbook: The Moor of the Bronx (Finishing Line Press, 2023), Of Jíbaros and Hillbillies (Plain View Press, 2011), and The Recital (Winged City Press, 2011). Nazario y Colón was a co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets and encourages readers to see connections between Puerto Rico and Appalachia, and many of his topics echo those found in much Appalachian writing—family, poverty, discrimination, and the beauty of the mountains. Since, furthermore, many Hispanics have immigrated to Appalachian communities such as Dalton, Georgia, Nazario y Colón’s poetry underscores Appalachia’s connectedness to the global community.
GENRE SESSIONS
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. As a fiction writer, she is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work in nonfiction has been a recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for the Essay, the New Southerner Award, the Orison Anthology Award for Creative Nonfiction and, most recently, the LitSouth Award. She has co-edited, with poet Adrian Blevins, an essay collection called Walk till the Dogs Get Mean. Wanting Radiance, a novel, and Voice Lessons, a short collection of lyric essays, came out in 2021. A new essay collection, I Could Name God in Twelve Ways came out in September 2024 from University Press of Kentucky.
Meredith McCarroll was born and raised in Western North Carolina, where she grew deeply interested in the intersections of race and region. Meredith’s writing includes academic work on film and representation in Appalachia (Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, University of Georgia Press, 2018) and her co-edited collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press) won the American Book Award in 2019. Her political voice has been featured in The Boston Globe, CNN, MSNBC, All Things Considered and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Still, Bitter Southerner, Reckon Review, Cutleaf, Cleaver and elsewhere. Her most recent fiction was published at Salvation South. Her latest book, out on submission, explores issues of home, loss, and claims to Cherokee identity.
Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel Trampoline. His second novel, Weedeater, was published in 2018. His third novel, Pop, was published in 2021. All three novels are published by Ohio University Press. In 2021, the trilogy won the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. From 1997 to 2018, Gipe directed the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan. Gipe is founding producer of the Higher Ground community performance series, and has served as a script consultant for the Hulu series Dopesick and a producer on the feature film The Evening Hour. Gipe resides in Harlan County, Kentucky. He grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee.
Wes Browne is the author of They All Fall the Same and Hillbilly Hustle. He has lived and practiced law as a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, and public defender in Appalachian Kentucky for over twenty-four years. He also helps run his family’s pizza shops.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio and the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project, as well as editor of its anthology series Women Speak. She is the recipient of a POTY Award, StoryTrade Award, Legacy Award, Best Book Award and a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow and a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. Her focus is on lifting up underrepresented voices including incarcerated adults and women in recovery. Her work has been featured in the American Book Review, World Literature Today, The New York Times, Poem-a-Day and on her website: www.kariguterseymourpoet.com
Denton Loving lives on a farm near the historic Cumberland Gap where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia come together. He is the author of the poetry collections Crimes Against Birds, Tamp, and Feller (forthcoming 2026). He is also the editor of Seeking Its Own Level: an anthology of writings about water. He has received scholarships and fellowships from organizations such as the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, the Eckerd College Writers Conference, and the Key West Literary Seminars. He earned the Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. He is a cofounder and an editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin and The Threepenny Review.
Halle Hill is the author of Good Women (Hub City Press), which was named a 2023 Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, O Magazine, Electric Literature, Book Riot and Southwest Review.
A finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award for Appalachian writing, she is the winner of the 2020 Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize and the 2020 Oxford American Debut Fiction Prize. Her short stories have been translated into French and published in journals including Joyland, New Limestone Review, Ursa Short Fiction and The Oxford American, among others. A born and raised East Tennessean, she currently lives, works and teaches in North Carolina.
AfterNOON sESSIONS
Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Swing, Five South, and Salvation South, 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). Her second book of poems, Water. Witness. Word., is forthcoming from Belle Point Press. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.
George Ella Lyon, a former Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of more than fifty books for children and adults. Among her poetry collections are Back to the Light, Voices of Justice, Many-Storied House, She Let Herself Go, Voices from the March on Washington (Cybils Award for Poetry), and Catalpa (Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year). Her poem “Where I’m From” is featured in the PBS series The United States of Poetry and has become a model for teachers around the world. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
Doug Van Gundy is a nationally-known Appalachian musician who has performed and taught throughout the United States and in Canada and Great Britain. Doug learned music in his family, his hometown of Elkins, West Virginia, and from master musicians Mose Coffman (1905 – 1995) and Dwight Diller (1946 – 2023). In 2017, Doug was recognized as a Master Artist by the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. For the past 28 years he has been playing fiddle, guitar, mandolin, harmonica and banjo with Paul Gartner as the old-time string duo, Born Old.
Doug also directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of journals, including The Guardian, Poets & Writers, Poetry, The Oxford American, and Guernica. He is co-editor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia (WVU Press) and the author of a book of poems, A Life above Water (Red Hen Press). His second poetry collection is forthcoming.
Tom Eblen, a journalist, writer and photographer, is literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning, where he manages the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. He was metro/state columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leaderfrom 2008 to 2019 and the newspaper’s managing editor from 1998-2008. Tom returned to his hometown in 1998 after 14 years with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and five years with The Associated Press. He has won many awards, including the 2013 media award in the Kentucky Governor’s Awards in the Arts. He was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2016. He was a contributing author for the book Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852 (University Press of Kentucky 2012). He is a member of The Kentucky Heritage Council and serves on the boards of the Mary Todd Lincoln House and Fayette Alliance. He is past president of the Bluegrass Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. His ancestors came to Appalachia in the 1700s.
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on traditional S’atsoyaha and Šaawanwaki lands.
Rae is the founder of Country Queers – a multimedia, community-based oral history project and podcast documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013. Rae is a senior Civic Media Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, a member of the Mapping Trans Joy team, and producer of The NERVE! Conversations with Movement Elders, a podcast from the National Council of Elders.
Rae is the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024) which received a 2025 Stonewall Honor Book Award from the American Library Association, and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans & Two Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, 2025).
Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her off hours, you can find her writing on her Substack, Winchester Ave, and posting photos of her Corgis on Instagram and Twitter @kdwinchester.
Tammy Oberhausen is the author of the novel The Evolution of the Gospelettes (Fireside Industries 2024). Born and raised in south-central Kentucky, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Western Kentucky University (where she learned from Professor Mary Ellen Miller) and her MFA in fiction writing from Spalding University (where Silas House served as her creative thesis mentor). She first shared early pages of this novel with Robert Morgan at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop more than 20 years ago. After three decades of working as a book editor and teacher, raising two daughters, and writing and rewriting that story, the Gospelettes finally made their debut. She lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with her husband, Samir.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel was born and raised in Redfox, Kentucky. She is the owner of the Read Spotted Newt, an independent bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky, and has been involved with the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and the Appalachian Arts Alliance, among other organizations. Her personal essays and opinion pieces can be found in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Journal, The Lexington Herald-Leader, and The Courier Journal.
