Featured Presenters

Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus, which bears witness to the struggles of a makeshift family of migrant farmworkers in California, and Their Dogs Came with Them (2008), a masterful depiction of the lives of the dispossessed, the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where Viramontes was born and raised.  

Named a Ford Fellow in Literature by United States Artists, Viramontes has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus and a 2017 Bellagio Center Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2015, California State University-Long Beach inaugurated the Helena María Viramontes Lecture.  Viramontes is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a novel.

Read more about our keynote speaker here. 

Gaylord Brewer has been a professor at Middle Tennessee State University for more than three decades, during which he founded and for 20 years edited the journal Poem & Plays. The most recent of his 17 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and cookery is a collection of brief nonfiction, Before the Storm Takes It Away (Red Hen, 2024). His forthcoming book of poetry Negotiable Gods won the inaugural Morse Code Poetry Prize and will be published in the spring of 2026 by High Frequency Press. He was awarded a Tennessee Arts Commission Fellowship in 2009.

 

 

Erika Howsare's first nonfiction book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, came out in 2024 from Catapult Books. She previously published two books of poetry and has worked as a local journalist in central Virginia for more than twenty years. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LongReads, Ecotone, and others, and she is also the host of an award-winning podcast miniseries called If You See a Deer. She lives in Virginia's Blue Ridge and teaches writing privately.

Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Prettiest Star, winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Fiction, the 2021 Southern Book Prize, and the Weatherford Award, and selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book by O Magazine. His debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012) was adapted into a feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His writing has appeared in various publications including The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, and Guernica. Carter was a 2024 finalist for the John Dos Passos Prize in Literature and the 2024 Granum Prize. Carter is an assistant professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University.

Amy Wright joined the faculty at East Tennessee State University after serving as their 2022 Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric, and Science. She has authored three poetry books, six chapbooks, and her nonfiction debut, Paper Concert (Sarabande Books), received a Nautilus Gold Award for Lyric Prose.

Megan Krupa is the author of the poetry chapbook, Heirloom. A 2025 representative of the Women of Appalachia Project, her poetry appears in BOAAT, Driftwood Press, Broad River Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Anthology of Appalachian Writers. She is an undergraduate alumnus of the Literature and Language Department at East Tennessee State University and received an MFA in creative writing from The University of Tampa. She is scheduled to complete her PhD at the University of Tennessee in Spring 2025. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor at East Tennessee State University supporting undergraduate and graduate teacher candidates.