Featured Keynotes
Each year, we invite storytellers from across the region to visit Nelsonville and share their love for storytelling in various forms to celebrate and elevate authentic Appalachian stories. We are so grateful to each of our keynotes. You can view videos of their performances below.
RACHEL SAGER, artist
2026 Awards Brunch
Over the past decade, Rachel has welcomed 500+ artists from six continents to build what she calls "a cathedral to coal" on eleven acres of concrete and green regrowth. Mosaics of miners, canaries, trains, and forty Pennsylvania birds now cover the walls where her grandfather's generation once dug bituminous coal. Fourth-generation coal country, Rachel has turned this legacy into a thriving small business—bricks and mortar at The Ruins, online teaching, Substack writing, and soon a new book. She builds her work from the same first principle her mother taught her: crown the ordinary with uncommon titles, and people will see what you want them to see. She believes the best stories are built with the conviction of a storyteller who believes in the spaces between truth and fiction.
ANN PANCAKE, author
2025 Awards Brunch
A native of West Virginia, Ann Pancake has published two award-winning short story collections and a novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been which was one of Kirkus Review’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year and won the Weatherford Prize (best book in Appalachia). Her stories, essays, and scholarship have appeared in venues like Orion, The Georgia Review, Poets and Writers, and The Journal of Appalachian Studies. She taught creative writing at several universities before becoming a freelance writer. She lives in Preston County, West Virginia.
MEGAN BEE, singersongwriter
2025 Outdoor Concert
Athens, Ohio based singer-songwriter Megan Bee's work has been called "as real as it gets”. As a former environmental educator, her lyrics are woven with imagery and metaphor from nature. She creates evocative songs of place through homespun vocals and winsome storytelling. Her album “Cottonwood” was listed in the best of 2022 by Americana UK and No Depression Magazine. She relentlessly tours the country, leads writing retreats, and is currently working on her fifth studio album.
ELAINE MCMILLION SHELDON, filmmaker
2024 Awards Brunch
An Academy Award-nominated, Peabody-winning, and two-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker from West Virginia. Sheldon premiered her latest feature-length documentary KING COAL at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The New York Times named it a Critics’ Pick, Esquire and Marie Claire named it one of the best documentaries of the year. KING COAL screened at over 40 festivals, 50 theaters and had its national broadcast premiere as the season opener for PBS’ POV, America’s longest running non-fiction series. Sheldon is also the director of two Netflix Original Documentaries - HEROIN(E) and RECOVERY BOYS - that explore America's opioid crisis. She has been named a Creative Capital Awardee, Guggenheim Fellow, a USA Fellow by United States Artists, and one of the "25 New Faces of Independent Film,” by Filmmaker Magazine. She has been nominated for six Emmy awards, three Peabody awards, and a Livingston Award. In 2024, Sheldon was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
ROGER MAY, photographer
2024 Evening Keynote
Roger May is an Appalachian American photographer and writer based in Alum Creek, West Virginia. His work explores the complicated history of place, faith, and identity in the coal fields. In 2014, he founded the crowdsourced Looking at Appalachia project, recently renamed the Seeing Appalachia project.