Artists

Jason Mott is a bestselling author of two poetry collections (We Call This Thing Between Us Love and “…hide behind me…”) and four novels (The Returned, The Wonder of All Things, The Crossing, and Hell Of A Book). He is the recipient of many awards and accolades including the North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and, most recently, the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Southeastern North Carolina.

Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist and an award-winning author of three New York Times bestselling books: Factory Man, Truevine and Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. Dopesick was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick has now been made into a Peabody award-winning and Emmy-winning Hulu series on which she acted as an executive producer and cowriter. Her fourth book,Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, was published in 2022.

SA Cosby is an Anthony Award-winning writer from Southeastern Virginia. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was named a best book of the year by NPR, The Guardian, and Library Journal, among others. His novel All the Sinners Bleed will be released in 2023.

Ashley M. Jones is the Poet Laureate of Alabama. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel, dark / / thing, and REPARATIONS NOW! Jones has been featured on news outlets including Good Morning America, ABC News, and the BBC. She co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and she is part of the Core Faculty of the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. 

Idra Novey is an acclaimed novelist, poet, and translator. Her third novel, Take What You Need, is forthcoming from Viking Books in the spring of 2023. She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and The Paris Review.

Eric Tran is a queer Vietnamese poet and the author of Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke and The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer. His work has been featured in All Things Considered, Best of the Net, and Poetry Daily. He is a psychiatrist living in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Powell is the author of eight novels, most recently Lioness (2022) and Hurricane Season (forthcoming in the fall of 2023). 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. His essays have appeared in Garden & Gun, the Oxford American, and The Daily Beast. He directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University. 

Angela Velez grew up in Baltimore, under the watchful eye of her Peruvian immigrant parents. She has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. Angela lives in Durham, with her piles of books, three plastic flamingos, and one wobbly disco ball, and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Lulu and Milagro’s Search for Clarity is her first novel.

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister and Fanny Says. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of poems about these animals, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative. She is also on faculty at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program.

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A. Kendra Greene is a writer and artist who has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and the Dallas Museum of Art, where she was a writer in residence. She became an essayist writing letters home from a Fulbright in South Korea, then earned an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa. Her work has since been published in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Atlas Obscura, and others. Her book, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, has been translated into German, with a French edition forthcoming.

Stephen J. West is the author of Soft-Boiled: an Investigation of Masculinity & the Writers Life. His writing has been published in Brevity, Ninth Letter, PANK, and other places, and he is the Assistant Interviews Editor for Hippocampus Magazine and the Editor and Curator of Undead Darlings.  He lives in Rochester, NY, where he is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at St. John Fisher University.

Charles Dodd White is the recipient of the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for excellence in Appalachian Literature, the Appalachian Book of the Year award in fiction, and a Jean Ritchie Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, His novels are How Fire Runs (A Fall 2020 SIBA Okra Pick, IPPY GOLD MEDAL for Best Fiction in the South), In the House of Wilderness (2018), A Shelter of Others (2014), Lambs of Men (2010), and the story collection, Sinners of Sanction County (2011). His newest book, A Year Without Months, is a fragmented memoir available from West Virginia University Press. He teaches English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. 

Lisa J. Lefler, Ph.D. is the Director for the Culturally Based Native Health Programs and a faculty member in the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Program at WCU. She received her PhD from the University of Tennessee and is an Applied Medical Anthropologist. She has worked with dozens of Tribal communities in the U.S., including the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in NC, as well as the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Chickasaw Nations in Oklahoma Among her publications include several edited volumes:  Anthropology: Weaving Our Discipline with Community (2020),Southern Foodways and Culture (2013), Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency (2009), and Southern Indians and Anthropologists: Culture, Politics, and Identity (2002) with Frederic Gleach.

Thomas N. Belt (Cherokee Nation) is retired coordinator of Western Carolina University’s Cherokee language program, recipient of an honorary doctorate degree from WCU and a national honor for service bestowed to him from the Cherokee Nation. Tom is a fluent Cherokee speaker. He attended the Universities of Oklahoma and Colorado and taught Cherokee language at the Cherokee Elementary School for 7 years. He is a frequent guest lecturer at universities including Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, Purdue, Stanford, Univ. of Pennsylvania, and Yale. He also works as a consultant for the American Philosophical Society’s CNAIR program in Philadelphia and for the Center for Native Health. Tom is also a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Native Culture & Health Workgroup. He is cofounder of the annual Rooted in the Mountains Symposium.