The Mountain Heritage Literary
Festival
June 13-15, 2008
Staff
 KEYNOTE
ADDRESS.
Lee Smith is one of the most celebrated authors in Appalachian and Southern Literature, having written such classics as Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, Saving Grace, and her most recent, On Agate Hill. Smith is a native of Grundy, Virginia, and now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
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 FEATURED MUSICIAN.
Sheila Kay Adams is a celebrated banjo-player, ballad-singer, storyteller, and writer. She has released several albums, including MY DEAREST DEAR and ALL THE OTHER FINE THINGS. She served as a musical director on the films SONGCATCHER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and is the author of two widely-acclaimed books, COME GO HOME WITH ME and MY OLD TRUE LOVE. She lives in Madison County, North Carolina, where she was born and raised.
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FICTION
MASTER CLASS. Mark Powell is the author of Blood Kin and Prodigals. A winner of the Peter Taylor Prize in Poetry, Powell is one of the most exciting new talents in Southern literature. A native of Mountain Rest, South Carolina, Powell is a graduate of Clemson University and the School of Divinity at Yale University. He lives in South Carolina.
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 POETRY
MASTER CLASS.
Maurice Manning is the author of Bucolics, A Companion for Owls, and Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions and the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Raised in Boyle County, Kentucky, Manning's poetry is deeply rooted in his family's homeland in Southeastern Kentucky. Manning lives in Washington County, Kentucky and Bloomington, Indiana, where he is on the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program at Indiana University.
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 NONFICTION MASTER CLASS.
George Ella Lyon is one of Appalachia's most beloved authors. Having published in nearly every genre, her most recent contribution is the bestselling memoir Don't You Remember? A native of Harlan County, Kentucky, Lyon now lives in Lexington.
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 SONGWRITING. Kate Larken is a celebrated singer, songwriter, and musician. She is a member of the bands Public Outcry and The Cosmic Mamaws and had a celebrated solo career that produced a much sought-after cd entitled Muddy Water. Larken also owns Motes Publishing, which has published such recent hits as Anne Shelby's Can A Democrat Get Into Heaven? and George Ella Lyon's Don't You Remember? A native of Kentucky's western-most county, Larken lived for many years in Appalachia and now resides in Louisville.
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 PLAY. Barbara Bates Smith brings Lee Smith's On Agate Hill to the the LMU stage. Best known for Ivy Rowe, her stage adaptation of Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith has performed in such plays as the world premiere of Horton Foote's Talking Pictures, as well as her best actress (Southeastern Theatre Conference, 2003) award-winning performance in Eleemosynary. She lives near Clyde, North Carolina.
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 SPECIAL GUESTS.
Darnell Arnoult is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, June 2006/2007) and What Travels With Us: Poems (LSU Press, October 2005), winner of the Weatherford Award and named 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year. She lives in Brush Creek, TN with her husband, metal artist William Brock. For more info, visit her website at
www.darnellarnoult.com.
darnell@dtccom.net
Richard Saunders is Curator of Special Collections/University Archives, and the Museum Director at the Univ. of Tennessee at Martin. Saunders is just finishing up work on Never Been Rich: Harry Harrison Kroll, Southern Ruralist Writer, the first biography of Kroll, who remains as one of LMU's most influential professors, having fostered the writing of James Still, Jesse Stuart, Don West, and many others. Saunders also wrote the introduction for the 2008 reissue of Kroll's most critically acclaimed work, Their Ancient Grudge.
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 DIRECTOR.
Silas House is the author of the national bestsellers Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, and The Coal Tattoo. He lives in his native Eastern Kentucky and serves as writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University and on the fiction faculty of the Spalding University MFA.
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 DIRECTOR.
Denton Loving has been published in Kudzu, Birmingham Arts Journal, and is a recent winner of the Gurney Norman Prize for Writing. He serves as Director of Prospect Research at Lincoln Memorial University and lives near Speedwell, Tennessee. |
*Partially funded by the
East Tennessee Foundation.
Lincoln Memorial University
Cumberland Gap Parkway
P.O. Box 2005
Harrogate, TN 37752
Phone:
423.869.6432 or 800.325.0900, ext. 6432
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