The Mountain Heritage Literary Festival
June 11-13, 2010

Staff

KEYNOTE ADDRESS.  Gurney Norman is the beloved author of Kinfolks and Divine Rights Trip. Norman grew up in Southwestern Virginia and Eastern Kentucky.  He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and Stanford University, where he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. In 1979, he joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky as an Associate Professor of English and he currently serves as Director of the English Department’s Creative Writing Program. In 1996 Norman's work as a fiction writer, filmmaker, and cultural advocate was honored at the Fifteenth Annual Emory and Henry College Literary Festival, which celebrates significant writers in the Appalachian region. In 2007 the Appalachian Studies Association awarded Norman the Helen M. Lewis Community Service Award, which recognizes exemplary contributions to Appalachia through involvement with and service to its people and communities. Norman serves as Senior Writer-in-Residence at Hindman Settlement School's annual Appalachian Writers Workshop.  Norman presently serves as the Poet Laureate of Kentucky.

KEYNOTE MUSICIAN.  Caroline Herring, a native of Canton, Mississippi, is one of the most exciting and acclaimed singer-songwriters of the moment and has been compared to Joan Baez and Bach. Herring took home best new artist honors at the 2002 Austin Music Awards during the South by Southwest music conference and has since played at such prestigious gigs as the Newport Folk Festival and New York City's Mercury Lounge. Her albums Wellspring, Twilight, and Lantana are considered some of the strongest of the last decade and in 2009 her album Golden Apples of the Sun established her as one of the best American singer-songwriters.  Herring lives outside Atlanta. 

 

FICTION MASTER CLASS.  Ann Pancake grew up in West Virginia. Her first novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been was one of Kirkus Review's Top Ten Fiction Books of 2007, won the 2007 Weatherford Award, and was a finalist for the 2008 Orion Book Award.  Pancake's collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless award, and she has also received a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, and a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Glimmer Train, Poets and Writers, Narrative, and New Stories from the South. She earned her BA in English at West Virginia University and a PhD. in English Literature from the University of Washington. Currently, she teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

NONFICTION MASTER CLASS.  Neela Vaswani lives in New York City and has lived all over the world, including Kentucky. Vaswani is he author of Where the Long Grass Bends, a collection of short stories and You Have Given Me A Country, a memoir.  Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Epoch and the Cimarron Review, among other publications, and have been widely anthologized, including in the Norton edition of multiracial literature. She is the recipient of a 2006 O.Henry Prize, a 1999 Italo Calvino Prize, and has been a Visiting-Writer-in-Residence at Knox College, the Jimenez-Porter House, the Whitney Museum in New York City, University of California, Santa Barbara, and other institutions. She received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Maryland. Her research on bicultural identity has been highlighted at academic venues and received a scholarly CHASA prize. She teaches Adult Literacy and ESL at the Center for Reading and Writing in New York City, and works with a number of activist and educational organizations in India, Kentucky, and New York.

POETRY MASTER CLASS.  Ron Houchin is a retired public school teacher who taught in the Appalachian region of southernmost Ohio for thirty years. Though raised on the remote banks of the Ohio River in Huntington, West Virginia, he has travelled throughout Europe, Canada, and the U.S.  His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, The Southwest Review, Appalachian Heritage, The New Orleans Review, and over two hundred other venues. He has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Grant for teachers of the arts, a tutorial fellowship to teach in a Dublin writing workshop, a poetry prize from Indiana University, as well as a book of the year award from the Appalachian Writers' Association.  His poems have been featured on Verse Daily. He has published four poetry collections:  Among Wordless Things, Death and the River, Moveable Darkness, and Museum Crows.

SONGWRITING MASTER CLASS. Sue Massek.  As a founding member of and banjo-player for the Reel World String Band, Sue Massek has been heavily influenced by her experiences at the Highlander Center, where she met and learned from activists like Rosa Parks and Pete Seeger.  With the Reel World String Band, Sue has toured the USA, Canada, and Italy and just finished their sixth recording project, "Coast is Clear."  Her solo work has taken her to Guatemala and Nicaragua, but more often she is in Kentucky schools teaching diversity, disguised as folk music and dance.  Sue's love for nature is a driving force in her life and many of her songs reflect her passion for protecting our environment.  Her songs have been featured in films and plays. 

SPECIAL MUSICAL GUEST Kate Larken will provide the introductory music for the keynote address of Gurney Norman.  Her music was featured in the film Maxine which was based on a short story by Norman.  A Kentucky native, Larken is a musician, writer, actress, and publisher.  She owns and operates Motes Books, which has published books by many prominent Appalachian authors.  She presently lives in Louisville.

 

DIRECTOR. Silas House is the author offour novels: Clay's Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), Eli the Good (2009), two plays, The Hurting Part (2005) and Long Time Traveling (2009), and Something's Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard. In 2009 the Silas House Literary Seminar was given at Emory and Henry College. 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. He is currently at work on his fifth novel Evona Darling.

DIRECTOR. Denton Loving is the 2007 recipient of the Gurney Norman Prize for Writing. His work has been published in Kudzu, Birmingham Arts Journal, Somnambulist Quarterly, Appalachian Journal, and Minnetonka Review, as well as in numerous anthologies including We All Live Downstreat: Writings About Mountaintop Removal . He serves as irector of prospect research at Lincoln Memorial University and lives in Speedwell, Tennessee.

University Advancement
Lincoln Memorial University
Cumberland Gap Parkway
P.O. Box 2005
Harrogate, TN 37752

Phone:
423.869.7072 or 800.325.0900, ext. 7072