Events
Classes, workshops, conferences, and readings I will be attending or offering.
Hindman Settlement School's Stafford Challenge - 1/17
Want to shoot for the moon and try to write a poem a day for a year? Sign up for the Stafford Challenge through Hindman Settlement School. We'll have weekly emails for inspiration and prompts, monthly zoom gatherings for sharing and commiserating, and all the perks offered by the Stafford Challenge itself!
​
Mildred Haun Conference - 2/7-2/8
The Mildred Haun Conference is a free literary and arts conference that occurs each February in Morristown, TN at Walters State Community College. A group of contributors to Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-year Flood in Eastern Kentucky will be presenting a panel about their experience of the deadly July 2022 flood.
​
To learn about the conference and register, click here: https://ws.edu/academics/academic-divisions/humanities/mildred-haun/index.aspx
Dinner on the Grounds - 2/12
The Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College runs a series to celebrate Appalachian writers and concerns. February 12 at 6pm, contributors of Troublesome Rising will read from the anthology and share their experiences of writing about such a historic event.
​
Information about the event can be found here: https://www.berea.edu/ljac-online-offerings/ljac-videos-slide-shows-events-recording/dinner-on-the-grounds
Online Makery Class - 2/24-3/15
In this class, we will focus on digging through our journals, pocket scrap papers and notes apps for those ideas, lines, and poem seeds we feel have promise but we haven’t done anything with yet, and we’ll develop them into fully-realized poems. We will meet over Zoom on Monday evenings to share what from our journals we will work on during the week as well as strategies for development, and Saturday afternoon we will discuss what grew out of our seeds and talk revision strategies..
​
Each registration for this class helps fund scholarships for high school writers to participate in Hindman Settlement School programming such as online classes and summer residencies.
​
Information about the event can be found here: https://hindman.org/events/germinatingpoemseeds/
Appalachian Studies Association Conference - 3/20-3/22
The 2025 ASA conference will be held in Cookeville, TN. I will be leading a session about my current poetry manuscript-in-progress, Flotilla: A Family Memoir in Verse. This poetry collection explores my family's history with immigration and the 6 ships that brought them here to the US, spanning from my own father back to my mother's ancestor that landed in 1625. The collection explores and interrogates what it means to be a white woman living here and raising children in context of this US history and all that entails. It focuses heavily on the silent women of the story and the loss of ancestral cultures in pursuit of being "American."
​
You can learn more about ASA and register here: https://www.appalachianstudies.org/2025-conference
​
Reading and Signing, City Lights, Sylva NC -- 3/29
I'll be joining fellow Troublesome Rising contributors Amy Le Ann Richardson and Doug Van Gundy for a reading at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, NC.
​
Troublesome Creek Writers Retreat - 4/11-4/13
At Hindman Settlement School, I'll be leading one of the spring retreats, a weekend to gather together, discuss craft, and get some work done! There will be optional sessions about various ways imagery can do heavy lifting in our writing. Applicable for all genres.
​
To learn more and register, click here: https://hindman.org/events/2025springretreat-helton/
