WCU Spring Literary Festival

1. WCU Spring Literary Festival April 8-11, 2013

2. DAWN GILCHRIST-YOUNG

3. DAWN GILCHRIST-YOUNG • educated at Swain County High School, Warren Wilson College, and Columbia University • taught English at Western North Carolina University • now teaches English at Swain County High School in Bryson City • won 2011 Norman Mailer Writing Award competition for High School Teachersfor her short story “The Tender Branch”. The winner receives a $10,000 cash prize and a fellowship to the Mailer Colony during the summer months. Copies of the story are available at the Norman Mailer Center website.

4. ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE

5. ANNETTE SAUNOOKE CLAPSADDLE • educated at Smoky Mountain High School, Yale University, College of William and Mary • teaches English at Swain County High School in Bryson City • awarded 2012 Morning Star Award for Creative Fiction from the Native American Literature Symposium and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies • produced Cherokee Elders: Our Greatest Generation and a series of children’s books including: The Elder Tree, True Blue, and What Wonders • recent fiction publications: “It All Comes Out in the Wash” Appalachian Heritage Quarterly; “Camouflage” Night is Gone, Day Is Still Coming,and a contribution to the collaborative novel Naked Came the Leaf Peeper.

6. MARK POWELL

7. MARK POWELL • educated at The Citadel, The University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School • teaches at Stetson University in Florida • Won 6th annual Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel – 2005 • author of two novels: Prodigals and Blood Kin

8. MARK POWELL • About the Peter Taylor Prize for the novel: • Blood Kin is "a powerful novel – fast-paced, riveting, and beautifully crafted," said author Jill McCorkle, who chose the novel from a field of five finalists selected from almost 400 entries

9. CHRIS HOLBROOK

10. CHRIS HOLBROOK • MFA from Iowa Writers Workshop • teaches at Morehead State University in Kentucky • won the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Celebration of Appalachian Writing award • author of two story collections: Hell and Ohio: Stories of Southern Appalachia and Upheaval: Stories

11. CHRIS HOLBROOK • “At the intersection of the gritty Southern fiction of Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown and the Appalachian literary tradition of James Still and Lee Smith, you will find Chris Holbrook.” (University Press of Kentucky on Upheaval: Stories) • And Ron Rash says, “I have long considered Chris Holbrook to be the most underrated writer in Appalachia. He is in the top tier of story writers in the United States.”

12. GUSTAVO PEREZ FIRMAT

13. GUSTAVO PEREZ FIRMAT • taught at Duke University for 20 years • now teaches at Columbia University • author of four collections of poetry, a novel, a memoir, & several books of literary & cultural criticism • “100 Americans to watch for the next century” (Newsweek) • “100 most influential Hispanics” (Hispanic Business Magazine)

14. GUSTAVO PEREZ FIRMAT • “Exiles hold onto their language as the one sort of portable piece of their homeland. Sometimes people think mother tongue, other tongue. But it's much more complicated. There are not only mother tongues. There are also father tongues, and sister tongues, and lover tongues, and brother tongues, and son tongues.” (NPR feature 10/17/11)

15. RANDALL KENAN

16. RANDALL KENAN • teaches creative writing at UNC-CH • recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, & the John Dos Passos Prize • author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits, the short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, as well as nonfiction and biography

17. RANDALL KENAN • “Randall Kenan is a genius; our black Garcia Marquez. He weaves myth, folktales, magic, and reality like no one else I know.” (Terry McMillan on Let the Dead Bury Their Dead) • "Randall Kenan continues [James] Baldwin's legendary tradition of 'telling it on the mountain' by giving voice to the unvarnished truth about blacks and homosexuality.“ (San Francisco Chronicle on A Visitation of Spirits)

18. ROBERT MORGAN

19. ROBERT MORGAN • born & raised in Hendersonville, NC • teaches at Cornell University • novel Gap Creek was an Oprah book in 2000 • too many honors & awards to list here • most recent books: Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion (nonfiction) and Terroir (poems)

20. ROBERT MORGAN • "Robert Morgan’s latest work is a tour de force of historical concision, combining prodigious research and adroit synthesis. The biographer of Daniel Boone and prize-winning novelist and poet sets his sights on creating ‘a living sense of the westward expansion.’“ (The Boston Globe on Lions of the West)

21. DANIEL WOODRELL

22. DANIEL WOODRELL • lives in the Ozarks, where most of his fiction is set • author of eight novels & two story collections • coined the term “country noir” for his work • author of Winter’s Bone, which was made into an Academy Award nominated film in 2010

23. DANIEL WOODRELL • “"The lineage from Faulkner to Woodrell runs as deep and true as an Ozark stream in this book...his most profound and haunting work yet." (Los Angeles Times Book review of The Outlaw Album: Stories)

24. NIKKY FINNEY

25. NIKKY FINNEY • won 2011 National Book Award for Poetry for Head Off & Split: Poems • teaches at The University of Kentucky in Lexington • Founding member of the Affrilachian Poets • On the board of Cave Canem African-American writers’ center

26. NIKKY FINNEY • “The poems in Nikky Finney's fourth collection, Head Off & Split, sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African-American life: from Civil Rights matriarch Rosa Parks, to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning, to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Her poet's voice is defined by an intimacy, which holds a soft yet exacting-eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother's wedding waltz with S.C. Senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heart-breaking hilarity of an American President's final state of the union address.” (National Book Award website)