Cormac McCarthy Literary Festival

Cormac McCarthy Logo landscape with date

The Cormac McCarthy Literary Festival celebrates authors preserving culture, sparking conversation and weaving tales in Appalachia. This three day festival, November 1st-3rd, 2019 will showcase local and regional authors, celebrate local history and Blount County Public Library's Centennial, and have activities for the whole family to engage with East Tennessee’s unique literary history.

Kidwell McCarthy Mosaic 2 Library
The festival is named after Cormac McCarthy to highlight his time in Blount County and also a piece of public art he made in 1971 while living here. This seven-ton Aztec-inspired mosaic was originally sited in downtown Maryville, but relocated to the library property in July 2000, during construction (and renovation of the downtown streetscape).

​Confirmed Authors

Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena and Above the Waterfall, in addition to four other prize-winning novels, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; four collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Rash twice received the O. Henry Prize and teaches at Western Carolina University.


Ron Rash
Sharyn McCrumb cropped

Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers, The Ballad of Tom Dooley, She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. ​Her books have been named New York Times and Los Angeles Times Notable Books, and her current novel, The Unquiet Grave, is a well-researched history of West Virginia’s Greenbrier Ghost. The Unquiet Grave was selected by the Georgia Library System as the 2017 selection for North Georgia Reads; the All Conference Read for the West Virginia State Library Conference; the West Virginia Featured Book at the West Virginia Book Festival; and a featured alternate by the Literary Guild.

A schedule of events will be released closer to the event, as well as an updated list of authors and other figures who will be attending the Literary Festival! Go to the library's Facebook Event page to check for updates!

Sponsored by:

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