Kaleigh Cox moved to the hills of Athens in 2012 and hasn’t looked back. She graduated from OHIO with two degrees in education and has been teaching English in southeastern Ohio ever since. She was recently awarded a Growing Home Fellowship through the Foundation of Appalachian Ohio, and she is working to cultivate a multigenerational culture of learning and loving storytelling through this festival initiative as well as creating a district literary anthology publication through Logan-Hocking School District where she is finishing up her seventh year teaching.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize, Jane Ann Devol Fuller was born and raised in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio. Her poetry manuscript Half-Life (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021) was a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Awards. Jane Ann taught creative writing at Hocking College for many years and her poems appear in several literary journals, including Shenandoah, Still:The Journal, I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, Women of Appalachia Project, Verse Daily, The Pikeville Review, Calyx, SWWIM and elsewhere.

As a lifelong resident of Gallia County, Aaron Walker is devoted to educating high school students and providing them authentic opportunities to engage with their Appalachian culture and identities. He designed a course in Appalachian Studies that has facilitated students’ interaction with their own culture outside the classroom and within the local community. This class has become the foundation for classes just like it in other area schools. He graduated from OSU with a BA in English and earned an MA in Education from OHIO. He has been teaching for 18 years.

Brianna Johnson is a Hocking County native passionate about Appalachian culture and its connection to literature and performing arts. Brianna is a fellow through the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio’s Growing Home Fellowship program. Brianna has a bachelor’s degree in English from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in English education from Ohio University. She has been teaching middle school language arts to children in Appalachia for ten years.

Lia Silver Birnbaum is a librarian and writer who has loved living in Appalachian Ohio for the past twelve years.  She is the branch manager of the Nelsonville Public Library, the main branch of the Athens County Public Libraries system.  She holds an MLIS from Kent State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in Saint Louis, from which she also received a Writer in Residence fellowship.  Her short fiction has been published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, and Joyland.