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Tennessee Mountain Writers will celebrate its 30th Annual Conference with the theme “No Grit, No Pearl” on Thursday through Saturday, April 5-7, at the DoubleTree Hotel in Oak Ridge. The conference will include workshops, writing contests, networking, manuscript evaluations, publishers, editors, book signings, a bookstore, vendors, and more, a press release said.

Marilyn Kallet will lead the Poetry workshops and will be the keynote speaker at the awards banquet, the concluding event of the conference, the press release said. Kallet, Nancy Moore Goslee Professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has published 17 books, including “The Love That Moves Me,” poetry from Black Widow Press (2013), and “How Our Bodies Learned,” lyric poetry from Black Widow Press (January 2018). She teaches poetry workshops each spring in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, at their French studio. She has performed her poems on campuses and in theaters across the United States, as well as in France and Poland as a guest of the U.S. Embassy. The University of Tennessee lists her as a specialist in poetry and dreams, poetry and healing, and poetry’s role in times of crisis.

Kelly O’Connor McNees will lead the Writing for Young People workshops and will be the General Session speaker. McNees is the author of “The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott,” “The Island of Doves,” and “In Need of a Good Wife,” a finalist for the 2013 Willa Award. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post and The Toast, and is forthcoming in the Chicago Anthology, the press release said. She is the recipient of the 2017 Meg Medina Artist-in-Residency Scholarship from the Highlights Foundation. She runs Word Bird Editorial Services, which helps writers of all stripes improve their craft and prepare their work for publication, and speaks at libraries, conferences, and book clubs. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Chicago with her family. [Read more…]