Featured Authors
Rick Bell
(Sponsored by Rivers Institute)
Rick Bell is a native of the Portland neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky -- one of the areas inundated during the Great Flood of 1937. He grew up hearing stories of the Flood and of the indomitable spirit of Louisville's citizens during that crisis. He has spent years collecting the stories and photographs -- many previously unpublished -- that are featured in this book. Bell serves as the Executive Director of the U.S. Marine Hospital Foundation in Louisville, and currently resides in its Crescent Hill neighborhood.
Tuesday, April 24th Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Austin Boyd
Austin is an award-winning author who writes extensively about faith issues related to technology and business. He published award winning poetry and more than two dozen technical articles and papers during his career as a Navy pilot, NASA astronaut finalist, and spacecraft engineer. The author of six novels, he is a Christy Gold Medal finalist (The Proof, 2007) and the winner of the Mount Hermon “Pacesetter Award.” Austin currently writes for Zondervan, Inc. and has previously written for the B&H Publishing Group of Nashville, TN, and NavPress, the publishing arm of the Navigators in Colorado Springs, CO. He has several novels in work based on themes tied to faith dilemmas in bioethics, as well as a Christian layman’s guide to Islam. Austin is employed as the Chief Executive Officer for Inergi, Inc., an engineering and design firm in Huntsville, Alabama. He is active in local ministry activities with Choose Life of North Alabama, the nation’s third busiest crisis pregnancy center, Southwood Presbyterian Church of Huntsville, and First Baptist Church of Huntsville where he has served as a teacher, deacon, and evangelist.
Monday, April 23rd Putnam County Public Library
Mark Brazaitis
Mark Brazaitis is the Associate Professor Director for West Virginia University. He is the author of The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Steal My Heart, a novel published in 2000. He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and his stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Sun, Witness, Beloit Fiction Journal, Confrontation, Notre Dame Review, and Shenandoah. In addition, he is a former Peace Corps Volunteer and Technical Trainer, Mark lives in Morgantown with his wife and two daughters. He enjoys two of the following: swimming, bike-riding, and skydiving.
Saturday, April 21th Short Story Panel Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Wiley Cash
Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina, a region that figures prominently in his fiction. His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. A Land More Kind than Home (William Morrow/HarperCollins, April 2012) is his first novel. Wiley holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.
Wednesday, April 25th Cabell County Public Library Huntington
James E. Casto
James retired in 2004 from The Herald-Dispatch, where he was a reporter and editor for more than 40 years. He is now senior public information specialist at the Robert C. Byrd Institute from Advanced Flexible Manufacturing. A Native of Huntington, he attended Bethany College at Bethany, WV, and is a graduate of Marshall University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a master’s degree in English. Jim has taught both journalism and English as a part-time instructor at Marshall and has worked (on loan from the Herald-Dispatch) as a member o the editorial page staff at USA Today. He’s a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Society of Newspaper columnists. In addition to his newspaper work, he’s written more than 150 freelance articles for magazines and newspapers and is the author of a number of books.
Sunday, April 23rd Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Jane Congdon
Jane Congdon has been an English teacher, a journalist, and a book editor. In her publishing career, she worked with textbook authors and traveled around the United States speaking to groups of business educators. Jane grew up in Glen Ferris, a small town in the mountains of West Virginia. She is a graduate of Concord University in Athens, West Virginia; a member of West Virginia Writers, Inc.; and a veteran of writing workshops including The Artist’s Way, the Split Rock Arts Program at the University of Minnesota, and the October Writing Festival at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. Jane lives near Cincinnati, Ohio. A member of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, she likes vampires and bats—the artificial kind.
Thursday, April 26th Friends Luncheon Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Mark Criley
Mark Crilley was raised in Detroit, Michigan where he began drawing at a very early age. He graduated from nearby Kalamazoo College in 1988, and then taught English in the Far East, first in Taiwan and then in Japan. It was while living in Japan in 1992 that he created the character of Akiko, eventually writing a 33-page comic book story entitled "Akiko on the Planet Smoo.” Upon returning to Michigan in 1995, he found a publisher for his tale and the Akiko series was born, eventually garnering a small but dedicated fan following. In 1998 Crilley was chosen by Entertainment Weekly for a spot on the "It List", their annual issue dedicated to the 100 most creative people in entertainment; this led to a deal with Random House and the publication of a novelized version of Akiko, which he wrote and illustrated. In 2004 the first issue in his Billy Clikk series was published, and his latest creation, the four-volume manga series Miki Falls, was recently published by Harper Collins. Kirkus reviews called Miki Falls "stellar" and the American Library Association put it on their official list of recommended graphic novels. It has since been optioned for film development by Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt's Plan B production company. Crilley says, “I sincerely hope I can spend the rest of my life doing just what I'm doing today: writing, drawing, and speaking to young readers at schools and libraries across the nation.” He lives in Michigan with his wife and two children.
Tuesday, April 24th Huntington High School
Sara Dooley
Sarah Dooley has written two books: Livvie Owen Lived Here and Body of Water. As a child, Sarah Dooley lived in twenty-four different places, including an abandoned post office, a tent, and a red cargo van. She graduated from Marshall University with a degree in education, and she now lives in Huntington, West Virginia with her partner and their assortment of dogs, cats, and horses. When she is not writing, she has the pleasure of teaching, and being taught by, children with special needs.
Wednesday, April 25th Our Lady of Fatima School
Thursday, April 26th, St. Joseph Middle School and High School
Joy Held
Joy Held is a college educator and award-winning author who knew at age ten she was going to be a writer. During her twenty-five year career as a professional writer, she has published a non-fiction book for writers, Writer Wellness, A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity; an historical romance novel (to be released in 2010 by The Wild Rose Press, www.thewildrosepress.com); and almost a thousand articles in magazines, newspapers, and poetry journals. She is particularly charmed by the new world of "art journaling" and the old-but-new-again world of steampunk fiction. Her book reviews can be found online at www.kidsreads.com and www.teenreads.com. Online articles on dance and theatre are located at www.danceruniverse.com. She has published multiple articles as a contributing editor for Dancer Magazine and Dance Teacher Now Magazine. Her work can be found in Yoga Journal, Woman Engineer, and Romance Writers Report as well as local and regional publications in West Virginia. She has presented writing workshops for over ten years for Central Ohio Fiction Writers, West Virginia Writers, Inc., Kentucky, Ohio, & WV Romance Writers, Ohio Valley Literary Group, WV Developmental Education Association, Wood County Reading Association, and the West Virginia Writing Project among others. Before writing, however, her world revolves around two daughters, a fab husband, and their pets. She is also a devoted student of hatha yoga.
Monday, April 23 Huntington Junior College
Regina Jeffers
Writing passionately comes easily to Regina Jeffers. A master teacher, for thirty-nine years, she passionately taught thousands of students English in the public schools of West Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. Yet, “teacher” does not define her as a person. Ask any of her students or her family, and they will tell you Regina is passionate about so many things: her son, children in need, truth, responsibility, the value of a good education, words, music, dance, the theatre, pro football, classic movies, the BBC, track and field, books, books, and more books. Holding multiple degrees, Jeffers often serves as a Language Arts or Media Literacy consultant to surrounding school districts and has served on several state and national educational commissions.
Monday, April 23rd Milton Public Library
Jason Lucas
Jason Lucas is a photographer who currently lives and works in Chillicothe, Ohio. Originally from Chesapeake, Ohio, Jason moved to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen, where he developed a fascination with the psychological and social impacts of design and architecture, with a special interest in language, context, boundaries, and liminal zones. He began shooting in 1992 at the age of 16, and always had a camera lying around somewhere, but began devoting the majority of his day to making photosafter moving back to Ohio in 2008. Jason has exhibited work at Kosmos Lane Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, the Brooklyn Art Library in New York City, Blank Gallery in Huntington, West Virginia, Ohio University’s Patricia Scott Gallery in Chillicothe, Ohio, Marshall University’s Gallery 842 in Huntington, West Virginia, and City Art Center in Delaware, Ohio. His images have appeared on the covers of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and Dharma/Arte Magazine, and he was a participating artist in Art House Co-Op’s A Million Little Pictures exhibit, which toured the U.S. during Fall 2011. His 2010 photobook, All Of This Can Be Broken, is part of the permanent collections of the Indie Photobook Library in Washington, D.C. and Booklet Library in Tokyo, Japan. His work appears regularly in Hillbilly Magazine.
Thursday, April 26th West Huntington Library
Marie Manilla
Pushcart-Prize nominee Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in The Chicago Tribune as a Nelson Algren finalist; Prairie Schooner, where she received the Lawrence Foundation Award; Mississippi Review; Calyx Journal; The Portland Review; The Long Story; Kestrel; GSU Review; Yemassee Review, Echo Ink Review, and other journals. Her collection of stories, Still Life with Plums (West Virginia University Press, 2010), was nominated for the Weatherford Award and ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year in the short story category. Manilla lives in Huntington, West Virginia where she is Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Marshall University
Saturday, April 21th Short Story Panel Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Monday, April 23rd Gallaher Public Library
Wednesday, April 25th Brown Bag Book Club Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Caroline R. Miller
Caroline R. Miller lives in Augusta, Kentucky and is a retired English teacher. Currently she is a researcher and writer for the Bracken County Historical Society. Miller’s latest work, Grapevine Dispatch: The Voice of Antislavery Messages, is the result of fourteen years of research. Her book skillfully relates the stories of those involved in the antislavery issue through interviews, newspaper accounts, court cases, government records, and other published and unpublished accounts. Among her many articles and books include Capitol Murder or Capital Mayhem: the Death of U.S. Congressman William Preston Taulbee, An American Nurse Ascending the Alps in Albania, Dachau Alum, eight volumes of compilations of slave records, five volumes of World War II letters, and a recent yearbook Veterans of Bracken County, Kentucky.
Tuesday, April 24th Ohio University Southern
Donald Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio, in a holler named Knockemstiff. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. He graduated from the MFA program at Ohio State University in 2009, and still lives in Chillicothe with his wife, Patsy. His first book, Knockemstiff, won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Third Coast, The Journal, Sou’wester, Chiron Review, River Styx, Boulevard, Folio, Granta, NYTBR, Washington Square, and The Berkeley Fiction Review. The Devil All the Time is his first novel.
Monday, April 23rd Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Justine Rutherford
Justine Rutherford grew up on a farm in Spurlock Creek, West Virginia. After a marvelous childhood, she went to high school at Milton, and attended Marshall University. She became a nurse in 1962 before retiring from ST. Mary’s Hospital in 1986. She has two sons, seven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
Tuesday, April 24th Salt Rock Public Library
Carter Taylor Seaton
Carter Taylor Seaton is an award-winning author and figurative sculptor. Born and raised in West Virginia, she graduated from Marshall University and lived in Columbus and Atlanta, Georgia from 1985-1995 before returning to her hometown of Huntington where she resides with her husband, Richard Cobb. While living in Georgia, she began running and completed several marathons after she was fifty, including the Atlanta, Marine Corps, and New York City Marathons. For fifteen years, she directed a rural Appalachian craft cooperative to benefit low-income women. Ladies Home Journal nominated her in 1975 for its "Woman of the Year" award. Her first novel, Father’s Troubles, was named as a finalist for the prestigious ForeWord Magazine 2003 Book of the Year award in the Historical Fiction category. She is a regular contributor to several regional magazines and The West Virginia Encyclopedia. In 2007, her article on the impact of the back-to-the-land movement on West Virginia was featured in Appalachian Heritage literary journal and won the Denny C. Plattner Award for its Best Work of Non-Fiction. Learn more about Carter and her work as an author and sculptor at www.carterseaton.com.
Sunday, April 23rd Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Rose Senehi
Rose Senehi lives in Chimney Rock, NC, and writes about southern families caught in a struggle to hold onto their land. Written with extraordinary empathy toward this universal theme, her character-driven novels also include a portrait of the everyday efforts of local conservancies to abate these pressures. Her novel, In the Shadows of Chimney Rock, was a finalist for the SIBA Book Award as the Best in Southern Literature in 2009. The Wind in the Woods, the second stand-alone novel in her Southern Blue Ridge Series was nominated for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Her third book in the series, Render Unto the Valley, has been selected as an OKRA PICK by the Southeast Independent Book Selllers Alliance. Fred Chappell, North Carolina’s Poet Laureate Emeritus, offered the following endorsement of her third Blue Ridge book: “Render Unto the Valley is a many-stranded tale of three generations of a star-crossed family struggling to mend itself and preserve something of its heritage. In the midst of this tempestuous story stands Travis Whitfield, as stony hearted a bad hat as you are ever likely to meet. But the female forces arrayed against him are formidable. Are they strong enough to prevail? Read and you’ll find out. But be warned: It’s a breathless ride.”
Tuesday, April 24th Cabell County Public Library Huntington
Gina Simmons
Gina Simmons is a published author and ambassador for everything positive about the Appalachia culture and her native West Virginia. Simmons grew up in the small village of Lavalette, near Huntington, West Virginia. At the age of eight, Simmons first sought to understand how her hometown got its unique name. What seemed like a simple question turned into almost two decades of research and uncovered an even more interesting narrative than Simmons could have imagines. Published in 2009 Discovering Lavalette answers Simmons’s childhood question about her village’s namesake but leaves newly-discovered questions unanswered. The book is currently being made into a documentary film. In 2011, Simmons founded the Discovering Lavalette Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the identity of the Appalachia Culture outside the state while providing scholarship and economic stimulus to the local community.
Monday, April 23rd Ceredo Kenova Public Library
Aaron Starmer
Aaron Starmer was born in California and raised in New York. After graduating from Drew University and receiving a master's in cinema studies from NYU, he worked for ten years as an expert in travel literature and a specialist in African safaris. Currently, he can be found writing and editing books from his apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife. He has written extensively for the travel industry, has contributed to a McSweeney's anthology, and is the author of two novels for young readers. His first novel, DWEEB (Random House, 2009), is a comic adventure involving five eighth graders who must harness their nerdish powers to expose a conspiracy involving fast food, standardized testing, and a school full of overachieving zombies. His latest, THE ONLY ONES (Random House, 2011), is an apocalyptic fable about the last innocent boy in the world and his journey to a village of oddball children who see either salvation or doom in the giant machine he asks them to build out of the scraps of an amusement park. Aaron is a frequent visitor to Huntington, where his sister, brother-in-law and nephews live, and he is excited to have a chance to share his writing with their friends and neighbors.
Monday, April 23rd Huntington Middle School
Sarah Sullivan
Sarah Sullivan is the author of four picture books, most recently Passing The Music Down, a story inspired by the real-life story of two old-time fiddle players, That book was nominated for a West Virginia Children's Choice Award as well as the Cybils award. Sarah's third book, Once Upon a Baby Brother, was included on the Bank Street College Best Children's Books of 2011 list. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children from Vermont College where she won the Harcourt Post-Graduate Scholarship. Her poetry has been published in Cricket magazine and her first novel for middle grade readers is forthcoming from Candlewick. Sarah has taught in writing workshops at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD and in the Highlights Founders Workshops, as well as in libraries and schools throughout the country. Sarah was born in Fairmont, attended first and second grades in Huntington and currently lives with her husband in Charleston.
Tuesday, April 24 Barboursville Public Library with Michael Garvin
Tuesday, April 24 Salt Rock Public Library with Michael Garvin
Thursday, April 26 Guyandotte Public Library with Michael Garvin
Thursday, April 26 Central City School with Michael Garvin
Pastor Steve Willis
Steve Willis is the lead pastor at the First Baptist Church of Kenova, WV and the Marshall Community Fellowship on the campus of Marshall University. He is most well-known nationally for his efforts to curb childhood obesity and his role on ABC's Emmy-Award winning ''Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.'' Steve has completed his studies for degrees from West Virginia University (B.A., Psychology), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M., Educational Leadership), and Southern Seminary (Ed.D., Leadership), and has recently completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Human Development from Southern in Louisville, KY. He is married to Deanna, his wife of 21 years, and they have three children (Titus 15, Johnna 13, Lucas 11). God has blessed Steve to share God's love on 5 continents, over 20 countries, and on media venues such as ABC, Nightline, Larry King Live, CNN, KLOVE, Focus on the Family, and the Dove Awards (Philippians 3:8). Steve enjoys sports, the outdoors, and traveling for the purpose of mission work and experiencing God's creation.
Tuesday, April 24th West Huntington Public Library
