Logo for: North Carolina Writer's Network

Faculty

REGISTRATION CLOSED

  • Brandon Amico

    Brandon Amico is the author of a collection of poetry, Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019), and is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. He serves as Poetry Editor at The Florida Review. He is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant, the Richard M. Ford Writing Award, and the Hoepfner Literary Award for poetry, awarded by Southern Humanities Review. His poetry can be found in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2020, Blackbird, Booth, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New South, North American Review, and Waxwing, and featured on Verse Daily. His reviews have been featured by 32 Poems, AGNI Online, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, The Rumpus, and Southern Humanities Review.

  • Mildred Kiconco Barya

    Mildred Kiconco Barya is a North Carolina-based writer and poet of East African descent. She teaches and lectures globally, and is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School published by Terrapin Books, 2023. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in New England Review, Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Forge, and elsewhere. She serves on the boards of African Writers Trust, Story Parlor, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs here: www.mildredbarya.com.

  • Michele Tracy Berger

    Michele Tracy Berger is the director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. She has faculty appointments in the Departments of English and Religious Studies. Her short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction has appeared in 100 Word Story, Apex Magazine, Glint Literary Journal, The Wild Word, Blood and Bourbon, FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Midnight and Indigo, Oracle: Fine Arts Review, Carolina Woman, Ms., and various anthologies. She is the 2019 winner of the Carl Brandon Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society for her story “Doll Seed” published in FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. Much of her work explores psychological horror, especially through issues of race and gender. Her short story collection Doll Seed will be published by Aunt Lute Books in fall 2024.

  • Catherine Carter

    Catherine Carter is the author of four full-length collections, Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press 2019), The Swamp Monster at Home (LSU Press 2012), and The Memory of Gills (LSU Press 2006), with By Stone and Needle forthcoming (LSU Press 2025). Jacar Press has printed her two chapbooks, Marks of the Witch and Good Morning, Unseen, and she is co-editor and co-translator, with Brian Gastle, of the first full-length verse translation into modern English of John Gower’s 33,000-line Middle English poem The Lover’s Confession (Medieval Institute Publications 2023). Her poems tangle and entangle with animism, mystery, and justice; her work has appeared in Poetry, Orion, Ploughshares, RHINO, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, NCLR, and Best American Poetry 2009, among others. She is a professor at Western Carolina University, where she helps to prepare future English teachers; on a good day, she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak, and on less-good days, she collects stings, rock-rash, and multiple contusions.

  • Portrait of Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

    Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

    Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, resides in Qualla with her husband Evan and sons Ross and Charlie. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. In 2021, it received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Clapsaddle’s work has appeared in various publications such as Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Our State, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, Salvation South, and The Atlantic. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette returned to teaching at Swain County High School for more than a dozen years. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies, serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum of the Cherokee People, and is the President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

  • Maggie Cooper

    Maggie Cooper is an agent with Aevitas Creative Management, representing fiction and nonfiction with a focus on imaginative, hopeful writing; queer and trans stories; and books that make our world kinder, weirder, more joyful, or all three. Based in the Boston area, Maggie is a graduate of Yale University, the MFA writing program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and the Clarion Writers Workshop. Maggie is also a writer, and her prose chapbook The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is out September 2024 from Bull City Press.

  • Patrick Cumby

    Patrick Cumby is the author of the Legends of the Known Arc stories and books. Patrick’s debut science fiction novel, a cross-genre mix of hard-SF, space opera, and LitRPG called Grone, was released in April 2023. Seattle Book Review called it “An absolute masterpiece of science fiction.” In January 2024, he released a highly anticipated companion novel called Longstar. Patrick has written for the Star Trek Universe, is a member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, and supports local writing groups and environmental causes in his hometown of Asheville.

  • Tanya Davis

    In Threads: A Tapestry of Life in the Black Community of Shiloh and Beyond, Tanya Davis offers a window into a small, vibrant African American community in Asheville. Drawing from rich traditions, struggles, triumphs, and everyday lives of historic Shiloh residents, Tanya shares untold narratives that create a greater understanding of Black life in Shiloh and beyond. She holds a bachelor’s degree in counseling from DePaul University with an emphasis on Narrative and a master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Lenoir-Rhyne University.

  • Keith Flynn

    Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of eight books, including six collections of poetry: most recently Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013) and The Skin of Meaning (Red Hen Press, 2020), and two collections of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer’s Digest Books, 2007), and Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession (RedHawk Publications, 2021). From 1984 to 1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation Nervous Splendor (2003). His latest album is Keith Flynn & The Holy Men, LIVE at Diana Wortham Theatre (2011). He is the Executive Director and producer of the TV and radio show LIVE at White Rock Hall (www.liveatwhiterockhall.com) and Animal Sounds Productions, both of which create collaborations between writers and musicians in video and audio formats. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, Five Points, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The Poetics of American Song Lyrics, Writer’s Chronicle, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994.

  • Author photo of Tessa Fontaine

    Tessa Fontaine

    Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts and the novel The Red Grove. Her books have been selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and best books of the year from Amazon, Southern Living, The New York Post, and more.

  • Robert Gipe

    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.​

  • Gold Leaf Literary

    Gold Leaf Literary was launched in 2016 by friends and independent booksellers, Caroline Christopoulos and Lauren Harr. Caroline still works very part-time at Malaprop’s, where she’s been a bookseller for more than two decades. She’s also on the programming committee for the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival. Lauren has worked in the book world for more than twenty years—as a bookseller, at literary nonprofits, as an intern at Graywolf Press, and a marketing assistant and publicist at Coffee House Press. She also holds an MFA from Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann School of Writing. Their shared goals include getting books and authors the information they need to be successful, building and sustaining community, and using their powers for good.

  • Rachel M. Hanson

    Rachel M. Hanson is the author of The End of Tennessee: A Memoir (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), and her nonfiction has won Best of the Net and earned Notable Mention in Best American Essays. Her prose and poetry can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The North American Review, and many other literary journals. A recipient of the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University, Rachel holds a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Missouri, and she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

  • Lori Horvitz

    Lori Horvitz’s first collection of memoir-essays, The Girls of Usually, won the 2016 Gold Medal IPPY Book Award in Autobiography/Memoir. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Epiphany, South Dakota Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Bustle, and Hotel Amerika. Professor Emeritus of English at UNC Asheville, Horvitz holds a PhD in English from SUNY Albany, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. In a starred review from Kirkus, the critic calls Lori’s latest book, Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep: “A scintillating collection, full of subtle wit and passionate yearning.”

  • Robert Inman

    Novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and songwriter Robert Inman is a native of Elba, Alabama and a graduate of The University of Alabama with an MFA in Creative Writing.  He left a 30-year career in television news in 1996, most of it with Charlotte’s WBTV, to devote full time to his writing career. He is the author of six novels including the The Governor’s Lady, Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, and Captain Saturday.  His latest novel, Villages, will be published in February 2025 by Livingston Press.  He is also the author of Coming Home: Life, Love and All Things Southern and The Christmas Bus. He is the author of eight stage plays, including two musicals, and six motion pictures for television, two of which have been “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentations.

  • Kelle Jolly

    Kelle Jolly is the “Tennessee Ukulele Lady.” She is a multifaceted musician, renowned for her exceptional talents as a ukulele player, vocalist, and storyteller. As a fixture at the esteemed Dollywood Flower and Food Festival since 2020 and as the host of Jazz Jam with Kelle Jolly on WUOT 91.9FM since 2014, she has solidified her position as a prominent figure in the music scene of Knoxville, Tennessee. Kelle is a 2023 Black Appalachian Storytellers Fellow with the National Association of Black Storytellers and South Arts.

  • Jeremy Jones

    Jeremy Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (2014) and a forthcoming nonfiction book exploring his ancestor’s coded diaries (2025). His essays appear in Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, and Garden & Gun, among others, and he writes regularly for Our State Magazine. Jeremy co-edits the book series In Place from WVU Press and serves as an associate professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where he also directs the annual Spring Literary Festival.

  • Paul Jones

    Paul Jones, Professor Emeritus of Information Science at the University of North Carolina, has been a frequent commentator on technology and society for Imaging the Digital Future (once Imaging the Internet) for the Pew Center and Elon University. Jones was inducted into the NCSU Computer Science Hall of Fame for his contributions to Open Source systems and his intense dislike of email (among other things). In early 2024, a manuscript of his poems landed safely on the moon as part of the Archmission.org project. By his own account, “I used to teach people how to use technology. Later I taught technology how to use people.” His books Something Wonderful and Something Necessary are available from Redhawk Publishing. Jones is of two minds about Artificial Intelligence.

  • Denton Loving

    Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collections Crimes Against Birds and Tamp, recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Ecotone. His third collection of poems, Feller, is forthcoming in 2025 from Mercer University Press.

  • Ronni Lundy

    Ronni Lundy is the double James Beard Award-winning author of Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes, 2016’s Best American Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year. Beginning with her groundbreaking Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken in 1991, Lundy has established a reputation as both a perceptive and engaging authority on the foodways and culture of the Mountain South. Born in Corbin, Kentucky, and raised in Louisville with strong ties to the Appalachian Mountains, she often writes from the perspective and about the experience of the Appalachian diaspora, but her 35-year career as a professional writer has also included thoughtful work on popular music, literature, and personalities throughout the South and beyond. Her many honors include the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award recognizing her work as a writer covering both food and music. Lundy is a founder of that organization as well as a founder of the Appalachian Food Summit. She is the author of 10 books, and currently is the owner and chief bookseller at Plott Hound Books in Burnsville, where she is living happily ever after in a tiny house in a tiny holler.

  • Maggie Marshall

    Maggie Marshall is the co-founder and Co-Director of the Flatiron Writers Room literary center in Asheville. Her first career was as a professional actress on regional stages throughout the US, including Broadway and Los Angeles, and in Dublin, Ireland. She then shifted into screenwriting, eventually landing in series television and writing for numerous cable and syndicated one-hour dramas. She is the recipient of the Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Award and a Scriptapalooza Award, both for One-Hour Drama. She recently completed work on a novel, The Last Canal, which is currently being shopped to publishers, and has had fiction and nonfiction pieces published in The Great Smokies Review.

  • Jennifer McGaha

    Jennifer McGaha is the author of three works of creative nonfiction including Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read; Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist; and The Joy Document, a collection of fifty essays celebrating midlife (forthcoming from Broadleaf Books in November). Her work has also appeared in many magazines and literary journals including Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brevity, Bitter Southerner, Crab Creek Review, River Teeth, and others.

  • Erica Allen McGee

    Erica Allen McGee (www.ericamcgee.com) has written 2 nationally produced musicals (book and score) and one musical unpublished, 8 children’s musicals, and three holiday pageants. She has also written several ten-minute plays and two straight plays. Her shows Girls Raised in the South-GRITS: The Musical and Cinnamon GRITS: Christmas in the South are published by Broadway Licensing and have been performed all over the US. Her new musical DeWitched has been workshopped in Charlotte and her children’s plays have been produced through her children’s theater organization, Playground Players in the Carolinas. Erica’s newest play, Oy Vey Y’all, landed her the 2024 Screen Craft Mentorship Prize. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mount Saint Mary’s University in LA and her personal essays have been featured in a wide range of publications. Erica is the Dramatist Guild Ambassador for North Carolina. She lives in Charlotte.

  • Kate Arden McMullen

    Kate Arden McMullen (she/her) is the Managing Editor of Hub City Press, a nonprofit independent publisher of extraordinary writers from the American South. She is on the hunt for voice-driven books from the margins of Southern experience. Kate received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and began her publishing career at UNCW’s Lookout Books. A fiction writer, she is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee and 2015 winner of the Colbert Chapbook Award. She lives in Spartanburg, SC.

  • Heather Newton

    Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) won the NC Indie Author Project book award for adult fiction, was a finalist for the Forword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022) was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter Prize. Her novel Under the Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection, and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. A practicing attorney, she teaches creative writing for the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts, UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program, and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville. Learn more at www.heathernewton.net.

  • Ronnie Pepper

    Ronnie Pepper, a Hendersonville native, is a storyteller and has been since his teenage years. In 2023 he was awarded the National Association of Black Storytellers Fellowship award for North Carolina as a Black Appalachian storyteller, which was presented at the 41st National Association of Black Storytellers in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has appeared on stage in performances of Driving Miss Daisy, Little Foxes, A Raisin in the Sun, and Dream Girls at the Hendersonville Community Theatre. He has also performed for Blue Ridge Community College and the Asheville Community Theatre.

  • Ron Rash

    Ron Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Caretaker, The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller; and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, his books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University and is a 2024 inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

  • Meg Reid

    Meg Reid is the Executive Director of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, SC, and the Publisher of Hub City Press, where she finds and champions new and overlooked voices from the American South. She is outspoken about the need for transparency and accountability in book publishing and advocates for a decentralized model, grounded in local communities. An editor and book designer, her essays have appeared online in outlets like DIAGRAM, the Oxford American, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as Assistant Editor of the literary magazine, Ecotone, and worked for the literary imprint Lookout Books. She was a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2021.

  • Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

    Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn is a writer, editor, and educator. She was Editor-in-Chief at The Rumpus from 2020 to 2023 and remains at the magazine as a Senior Features Editor. Her writing has been published in various literary journals, including Catapult; Fourth Genre; Brevity, where it was nominated for Pushcart Prize; Prairie Schooner, where it received the Glenna Luschei Award for Nonfiction; and online in Hanif Abdurraqib’s 68to05 project. Her essay collection, A Fish Growing Lungs, was published by Burrow Press in 2020 and was a finalist for The Believer Book Awards in Nonfiction.

  • Lauren Scovel, literary agent

    Lauren Scovel

    Lauren Scovel is an agent with the Laura Gross Literary Agency. She grew up outside of Seattle and graduated from Emerson College with a degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing as well as Theatre Studies. She began her publishing career as an editorial intern at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth (now part of Aevitas Creative Management). Lauren’s editorial work can be seen at The Millions and Pangyrus. She also worked as an indie bookseller for several years. Lauren is looking to amplify underrepresented stories and voices, and is especially interested in literary and upmarket-crossover fiction, narrative nonfiction, and contemporary children’s books (middle grade and young adult) with a timely, distinctive story, propulsive plot, and diverse cast of characters.

  • Alyson Sinclair

    Alyson Sinclair is the Publisher of The Rumpus, an online independent literary magazine dedicated to risk-taking work. She also runs a small literary publicity firm called Nectar Literary. Previously, she has been a publicist for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, McSweeney’s, and City Lights Books. She lives in Asheville.

  • Mariah Stovall

    Mariah Stovall is an agent at Trellis Literary Management, where she represents adult literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, all with an emphasis on innovation, voice, and underrepresented perspectives. Prior to joining Trellis, she worked at Howland Literary; Writers House; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Gallery Books. Mariah has done volunteer work with Periplus and the VIDA Count. She’s also the author of the novel I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both and a contributor to the anthology Black Punk Now.

  • Zackary Vernon

    Zackary Vernon is a writer and scholar based in Boone. His work has appeared in a range of magazines and journals, including The Bitter Southerner, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Cultures, and he has received both the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Randall Kenan Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review. He is the author of the YA novel Our Bodies Electric.

  • Ross White

    Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful collections.

  • Annie Woodford

    Annie Woodford is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019) and Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer UP, 2022), recipient of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023.  A recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University and the Thelma Smallwood Scholarship from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, she has also been a Rona Jaffe Poetry Scholar at Bread Loaf and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has been published in Carolina Quarterly, North Carolina Literary Review, Appalachian Journal, and The Greensboro Review, among others. Originally from a Virginia mill town near the North Carolina border, she now lives in Deep Gap and teaches at Wilkes Community College. More can be found at www.anniewoodfordpoet.com.

  • Lauren Yero

    Lauren Yero is a Cuban American writer and teacher who writes speculative, near-future stories of resistance and first love that question the structures our world is built upon. Her debut novel Under This Forgetful Sky, which came out last summer, was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” for teens by Kirkus Reviews, Bank Street, and Book Riot. Lauren lives with her family in the mountains of western North Carolina.