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Faculty

  • Kathryn Kirkpatrick Poetry

    Kathryn Kirkpatrick is the author of seven collections of poetry, including three recipients of the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell award, The Body’s Horizon (1996), Our Held Animal Breath (2012), and Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (2014). The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2019) received the NC Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke Chowan Poetry Prize. Although she grew up in the nomadic subculture of the U.S. Air Force and spent her childhood in the Philippines, Texas, and Germany, she has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains for many years, where she teaches environmental literature, animal studies, Irish studies, and creative writing as Professor of English at Appalachian State University. As a literary scholar, she has published essays on class trauma, eco-feminist poetics, and animal studies. She is the editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (2000) and co-editor with Borbala Farago of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (2015).

  • Mark Powell Fiction

    Mark Powell is the author of seven novels including Small Treasons (2017, Gallery/Simon and Schuster) and Lioness, forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in 2022. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. He directs the Creative Writing program at Appalachian State University.

  • Zackary Vernon Creative Nonfiction

    Zackary Vernon is an associate professor of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He has published numerous articles in magazines and journals, such as The Bitter Southerner, North Carolina Literary Review, Southern Cultures, and Carolina Quarterly. He is also the editor of two recent scholarly collections: Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash (USC Press, 2018) and Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (LSU Press, 2019). He is currently working on a novel-in-stories entitled The Flesh Parade.