2019 Program

The Keynote speaker at the first Rose Glen Literacy Festival in 2010. Stephen Lyn Bales will talk about the highlights of past festivals and invite his audience to join him.

Stephen Lyn Bales is a naturalist at Ijmas Nature Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. He has written for Smithsonian magazine and is a regular contributor to the Tennessee Conservationist magazine. Bales is also a regular speaker at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge and other venues.

His first book Natural Histories published by University of Tennessee Press. covered the natural history of East Tennessee. Bales’ second book, Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941 is the compelling story of Jim Tanner and his field work on the ‘Lord God Bird “in the late 1930s. Tanner was the only to conduct an in-depth study of the largest woodpecker to live in the United States, the legendary bird of the South.

Sam Venable will emcee a discussion between three authors who write about the Great Smoky Mountains Nation l Park. The authors will answer questions and share their stories of the natural and cultural wonders of the smokies.

Ben Anderson is the author of Smokies Chronicle: A Year of Hiking in Smoky Mountains National Park, that provides a fresh look and an engaging narrative about our most heavily visited national park through the eyes and ears of a lifelong devotee.

He was media relations director at Warren Wilson College from 1997 to 2015. Before that he was assistant professor of mass communications at Florida Southern College. He worked on the staffs of The Asheville Times, the Waynesville Mountaineer, Greensboro Record, Athens Banner-Herald, Atlanta Journal, Athens Daily News.

Ben has been a backcountry volunteer for Great Smoky Mountains National Park for more than 20 years. He now does marketing and public relations work for the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation in Asheville. A native of Atlanta, he lives in Asheville, NC.

David Brill is the author of Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Misdeeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He has spent decades writing about the Smokies. Brill is an adjunct instructor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism, he has been writing and working with the Great Smoky Mountains Association since 2006 and his devotion to the park goes back further than that.

Courtney Lix is the author of No Place for the Weary Kind: Women of the Smokies, a book that articulates the stories of 19 women of substance with strong ties to the Smoky Mountain region. Lix grew up in Gatlinburg.

She is the author of two books about the mountains and is a regular contributor to Smokies Life Magazine. Her writing awards include the Ferris Prize for Journalism from Princeton University, the Gregory T. Pope Prize for Science Writing, and recognition of FAQ Bears as the best general interest publication by the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2011.

She lives in Washington DC. The idea for the book, came from a series of articles she began writing for Smokies Life Magazine, Great Smoky Mountains Association’s bi-annual magazine featuring stories about an array of Smoky Mountain-centric topics.

Sam Venable is a semi-retired humor columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. The winner of numerous writing awards, he is the author of ten books. The newest collection is called Someday I May Find Honest Work, A Newspaper Humorist’s Life. In his latest book, Venable chronicles life and all the strange and absurd things that go with it. With his lively commentary and quirky observations, he brings an uncommon perspective to common experiences. But even as he describes these trials and tribulations, Venable admits—with what you can be certain is a big grin— “it sure beats workin’ for a living.”

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 18 books, including How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, poetry from Black Widow Press. She is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She has translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems, Péret’s The Big Game, and co-translated Chantal Bizzini’s Disenchanted City.

Her other volumes include children’s books, essays, anthologies of women’s literature. Dr. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years. For a decade, she has also lead poetry workshops for VCCA-France, in Auvillar. 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’s “America Presents” program.

Jack Neely is a journalist who has been writing about his hometown’s character and heritage for many years. After graduating from the University of Tennessee where he studied American history, Neely was an Egyptian museum tour guide at the 1982 World’s Fair; later he was a criminal-defense investigator, and an assistant editor for a national fiction magazine. Since his column, “Secret History” debuted in 1992, he’s been known mainly as a Knoxville journalist with an interest in the city’s unique culture and heritage.

He now writes for the Knoxville Mercury, a weekly column called “The Scruffy Citizen.” He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, most recently The Tennessee Theatre: A Grand Entertainment Palace (2015); Knoxville, Tennessee: Green by Nature (2014); Market Square: A History of the Most Democratic Place on Earth, and Knoxville, Tennessee: This Obscure Prismatic City (2009).

Robert Beatty is the author of the #1 New York Times best-selling Serafina Series published by Disney-Hyperion, a spooky mystery-thriller about a brave and unusual girl who lives secretly in the basement of the grand Biltmore Estate, surrounded by the opulence of the Gilded Age and the rugged beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Serafina and the Black Cloak was a #1 New York Times best seller, has been on the list for more than 60 weeks, and won the prestigious 2016 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. The second book in the series, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, became a #1 New York Times best seller in the first week of its launch and earned a “Starred Review” from Kirkus Reviews, which said, “Even better than its predecessor, a sequel that delivers nonstop thrills from beginning to end.”

Enjoyed by both young readers and adults alike, the Serafina books are being taught in over a thousand classrooms nationwide. The third book in the series, Serafina and the Splintered Heart, came out in 2017 to much acclaim. Beatty’s fourth book, Willa of the Wood (July 10, 2018), introduces a brand new heroine—a young forest girl with ancient magical powers who lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Robert Beatty lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and three daughters, who help create and refine his stories. He loves to explore the historic Biltmore Estate and the darkened forest trails where his novels take place. He writes full-time now, but in his past lives, Beatty was one of the early pioneers of cloud computing, the founder/CEO of Plex Systems, the co-founder of Beatty Robotics, and the chairman/CTO of Narrative Magazine. In 2007, he was named an Entrepreneur of the Year.

Bill Landry is the author of a new book, When Tennessee was the West. He was the voice, host, narrator, and co-producer of The Heartland Series which aired on WBIR-TV for about thirty years. Since its beginning in 1984, over 1,900 short features were produced, including 150 half-hour specials. Bill wrote, produced, and acted in many of the episodes.

Receiving an MFA from Trinity University at the Dallas Theater Center and a BA in literature from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Bill has gone on to receive two Emmy Awards for directing The Heartland Series, the Education in Appalachia Award from Carson-Newman University, and an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Lincoln Memorial University.