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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.
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.
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.
Lin Stepp is a native Tennessean, businesswoman and educator. A New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon best-selling international author, Lin now has sixteen published books, including her twelve beloved Smoky Mountain novels set in different locations of the Tennessee and North Carolina mountains, as well as a Smoky Mountain novella in one of Kensington’s Christmas anthologies. In addition, Lin’s first novel in a new Edisto Trilogy recently released, set on the South Carolina coast. Lin and her husband also write regional guidebooks, including a Smoky Mountain hiking guide and a Tennessee state parks book. Stepp’s latest 2019 releases are The Interlude, set in the Greenbrier and Pittman Center of the Great Smoky Mountains and Claire at Edisto set at Edisto Beach, South Carolina. Lin enjoys keeping up with her readers on Facebook, Twitter, and through her monthly blog on her website at: www.linstepp.com
Stacey Peebles is the Marlene and David Grissom Associate Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (2011) and Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (2017), and editor of the collection Violence in Literature (2014). She has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010, and is Vice President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. With Ben West, she is co-editing the collection Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy. Her other research areas include contemporary war stories, the Western, and superhero films.
Nik Buhler is a queer, Appalachian native living in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their work has appeared in Pheonix Literary Arts Magazine and Crab Fat Magazine. When they're not writing new poems and essays with the help of their cat, Nik can be found at Firefly Farms annoying sheep and chicken into loving them back.
With origins in Manila and growing up in Knoxville, TN, Arlynn Dunn is interested in the intersections of poetry, speculative nonfiction, and amplifying representation of transnational adoptees in the context of the Asian American diaspora. A full time pediatric occupational therapy assistant, Arlynn uses down time to grow as an emerging poet and reader, engage in community advocacy, and is frequently spotted at spoken word events or diving nose first into books and sometimes flan at La Esperan.
Go to the Cormac McCarthy Literary Festival schedule of events website page here and you may also go to the library's Facebook Event page to check for updates!