Appalachian Literary Arts & Storytelling Festival
held annually in Nelsonville, Ohio
Contest Archives
Over the years, the festival has orchestrated several contests to honor storytellers in the region. Click around to see some of the impressive work that came from these opportunities!
For 29 years, Deni Naffziger has been working to help artists with developmental differences at Passion Works Studio tell their own stories through poetry.​ Deni has been instrumental in the formation and progress of Passion Works Studios, and through ALAS we have been able to honor her impact with the creation of our annual awards: The DENI Awards.
​
Each DENI Award we hand out, from now on, will be representative of someone who is either helping others to tell powerful stories or someone who is telling genuine, important Appalachian stories themselves, through whichever medium they prefer.​
Throughout the spring of 2025, we collected poetry inspired elements of Appalachian foodways: the cultural, social, economic, and ritual practices surrounding food, including production, preparation, sharing, and consumption. Fourteen poems were chosen to be printed and packed into food boxes prepared by the Farm to Family Program, a mobile food pantry in Morgan County that addresses food scarcity each week of the summer when schools are out of session.
In partnership with Monday Creek Publishing, we offered an opportunity for local writers to win a publishing contract. Writers from Appalachia submitted the first 2500 words of their previously unpublished manuscripts and one overall winner was chosen. The five finalists and their synopses can be seen here.
In partnership with generous local poets, we invited artists to create a piece of art inspired by an Appalachian poem. A student and adult winner was chosen from each category, and the artists were able to meet the poet that inspired their piece at the brunch... a few of them even did a reading or performance!
Throughout the summer of 2024, we sent out a call for responses to photographs from Roger May's Looking at Appalachia - Call & Response project. We narrowed down the responses to TEN impressive stories, poems, and ruminations about the Appalachian experience.
To honor Roger May's participation as a keynote speaker for the first annual ALAS Festival, local school districts were tasked with creating a photography exhibit showing what students view as "their Appalachia" as a callback to May's own crowdsourced project. Students had to write a short paragraph to explain their intent with the image and the teacher leader also wrote a paragraph to explain the cohesiveness of the exhibit they put together from their pool of student photos.
In the early winter of 2024, we invited you to tell us the stories your holiday recipes carry. These four pieces (two stories, two poems) connect us, remind us, show us, and inspire us… through the foods they choose to serve their families and friends during the holidays. May they do the same for you through this season.​