Featured Presenters

Ron Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Caretaker, The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller, Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award, and In the Valley. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, his books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University.

Read more about our keynote speaker here. 

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition issued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where she volunteers at several animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, Brown has been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She first attended the Palm Beach Poetry Festival — the forerunner of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets — in 2004 and returned nearly every year thereafter as either a participant or mentor. In 2021, she began envisioning the future of the festival with founder Miles Coon and became president in 2022. Visit her website here. 

 

 

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. Her book of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry, is forthcoming from LSU Press in Spring 2026.She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American.

Currently, she is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Juan Martinez (PhD, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2011) is a fiction writer. He was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and has since lived in Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Glimmer Train, Ecotone, McSweeney's, TriQuarterly, The Sunday Morning Transport, Small Odysseys, Conjunctions, National Public Radio's Selected Shorts, Norton's Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America, and The Perpetual Engine of Hope: Stories Inspired by Iconic Vegas Photographs. Work is forthcoming in the anthology Flash Fiction America.