Faculty

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  Caleb Johnson SW26 Fiction Instructor

  Caleb Johnson is the author of the novels Telegraph Road (Hub City Press, Fall 2027) and Treeborne (Picador), which received an honorable mention for the Southern Book Prize and was longlisted for The Crook’s Corner Book Prize. He has been featured on the Emmy Award-winning television show TrueSouth. His nonfiction has been cited in The Best American Essays, and appears in Garden & Gun, Southern Living, The Wall Street Journal, as well as other publications. Caleb studied journalism at The University of Alabama and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wyoming. He has received fellowships from The Jentel Foundation, the Longleaf Writers Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at Appalachian State University and lives in Boone with his wife, the writer Irina Zhorov, their two sons, and a bird dog.

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  Caroline McCoy SW26 Creative Nonfiction Instructor

  Caroline McCoy‘s nonfiction writing has appeared in such places as The American Scholar, The Bitter Southerner, Roads & Kingdoms, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Juked, and the Oxford American, where she works at the digital managing editor.

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  Annie Woodford SW26 Poetry Instructor

  Annie Woodford is the author of Peasant (Pulley Press, 2025), Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer University Press, 2022), recipient of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry, and Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019). Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023.  Most recently, she was part of the poetry anthology Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood, proceeds from which go to support Hurricane Helene relief efforts. She has been the recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, the Thelma Smallwood Scholarship at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, and the Guy Owen Prize by Southern Poetry Review. She has also been a Rona Jaffe Poetry Scholar at Bread Loaf and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. In 2023, she was the writer-in-residence at Radford University’s Highland Summer Conference.