June 2026 Conference
Our 2026 June Conference will be held June 12-14 at Cedar Lakes in Ripley, WV.
Pre-conference FAQ: We've developed a FAQ document that addresses a lot of frequently asked questions.
Registration opens April 1.
Note: WV Writers only handles conference registration. Meals and lodging are handled by Cedar Lakes, and they require this mailed-in form to process your room and meals.
CONFERENCE SPEAKERS AND PRESENTERS
Pauletta Hansel (Keynote speaker) is a poet, memoirist and teacher whose newest book is a hybrid of poetry and prose entitled, Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia, out in October from University Press of Kentucky. Previous collections include Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press), poems of witness and protest; Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications) winner of the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award; and the Weatherford Award-winning Palindrome (Dos Madres Press 2017.) Her writing has been featured in Cincinnati Review, Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Cutleaf, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. Pauletta was born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, and was a founding member of WV’s Soupbean Poets and of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. She was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and was 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Visit her website at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
Workshops: Keynote & Epistolary
Keynote
The Poet as Historian. Pauletta Hansel will share her experience researching and writing about four centuries of national, regional, and family history, discussing her development both as writer and citizen in the process. The presentation will include excerpts of poetry and prose from her forthcoming book, Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia.
Dear Friend: The Letter as Literary Form
This workshop will focus on letter-writing as a flexible tool for developing characters, creating intimacy, and providing a sense of place. Open to writers of both poetry and prose, the main hands-on activity will be the epistolary poem.
Brad Barkley is the author of the novels Money, Love and Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual, named Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post and Library Journal. His short fiction has appeared in Fractured Lit, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, which twice awarded him the Balch Prize for Best Fiction. He has also authored three YA novels from Penguin/Dutton and received fellowships from the NEA and the Maryland State Arts Council. His new YA novel, The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, arrives from Regal House Publishing in June 2026. More at bradbarkley.com.
Workshops: Fiction & YA Fiction
Floaty-Groundy: A New Way to Think About Character and Plot
This session looks at the dynamic relationship between character and plot, focusing on how each can be either “floating” or “grounded.” We’ll examine how certain pairings create momentum while others quietly stall a story, and how revision can restore balance. Discussion will include examples, openings, and references to well-known stories and films.
YA Fiction: Writing for People Who Read Under the Covers With a Flashlight
This workshop focuses on the craft of YA fiction, from character and point of view to language, conflict, and stakes that resonate beyond “after-school-special” territory. We’ll talk openly about cursing, sex, and writing honestly for readers who are quick to detect false notes. Participants will leave with practical strategies, new pages, and a clearer sense of why YA writing matters.
Laura Treacy Bentley is an internationally published writer who was born in Hagerstown, Maryland. She has lived most of her life in Huntington, West Virginia, and divides her time between West Virginia and a cabin in Western Maryland. Laura is the author of a poetry collection, Lake Effect, a psychological thriller set in Ireland, The Silver Tattoo, a picture book, Sir Grace and the Big Blizzard, and a poetry/photography chapbook, Looking for Ireland: An Irish-Appalachian Pilgrimage. She received a Fellowship Award for Literature from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, and her work has been featured on the websites of A Prairie Home Companion, Poetry Daily, O Magazine, and Publishers Weekly. She served as the writer in residence for three years at the Marshall University Writing Project and taught creative writing at the 2013 West Virginia Governor’s School for the Arts at Davis & Elkins College. Her work has been published in the United States and Ireland in journals such as The New York Quarterly, Art Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Antietam Review, Rosebud, blink, Ginseng, Wind, The Stinging Fly, Kestrel, ABZ, Crannog, Now & Then, 3×10 plus, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Still, Goldenseal, and The Windward Review, among many others, including a number of anthologies. One of her poems is featured on a poster published by the Greenbank Observatory in Pocahontas County in West Virginia and another poem was displayed in a city bus in Morgantown, West Virginia. Laura read with Ray Bradbury in 2003 and signed her books with Nora Roberts at her Turn the Page Bookstore in 2017. Her newest novel, Glass Mountain, is a contemporary suspense novel published by Henlo Press.
Workshops: Fiction-Novel
Just Like Flying a Plane (both sessions)
Writing a novel is like flying a plane. Practical tips will be discussed to help you focus and overcome your fear of flying/beginning from the liftoff to dealing with turbulence, a non-stop flight, soaring, staying on course, and landing the plane. Take your time and enjoy the journey.
Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025) and My Pandemic / Gratitude List (Mōtus Audāx Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, is forthcoming from Running Wild Press.
Workshops: Poetry
Poetic Paradise
We will discuss a way of looking at place in order to find an imaginary paradise. Writers will be encouraged to write a poem in which they create their own myths based on their limited information about a real location.
Embracing Randomness
Poets will be shown a way to experiment with poems based on fragments and chance.
Andrew Garland Breeden is senior editor of The Upper Room daily devotional guide, located in Nashville, Tennessee. He is a graduate of Lipscomb University and Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He has been with The Upper Room for more than ten years. Andrew loves spending time outdoors hiking, cycling, and climbing. He lives in Charlotte, Tennessee, a beautiful, rural part of the state.
Workshops: Meditation and Inspiration
Writing a Meditation for The Upper Room
In this workshop participants will learn about making connections between their lives and what God is doing in the world. While some of the content will have broad application to writing short devotional pieces in general, it will address writing for The Upper Room more specifically. In our time together, we will look at a published meditation, discuss it, and then participants will have the opportunity to write their own and submit it for possible publication in a future issue of The Upper Room, an international publication with a readership of more than four million people worldwide.
Telling Your Story: A Spiritual Autobiography Writing Workshop
This workshop is designed to help participants practice their devotional writing skills through a process called spiritual autobiography. In this workshop, participants will engage in two writing exercises: one that will help them reflect on the significant events, people, and places that have influenced their spiritual journeys, and another that will guide them in shaping their reflection into a more organized narrative for use as a short devotion.
John Edward Harris I first walked a labyrinth in 1996 and have been walking and creating labyrinths ever since. I am a Certified Veriditas Labyrinth Facilitator and have been facilitating workshops and walks since 2023, including a workshop and walk for some writers in the northern panhandle.
Workshops: Unlocking Creativity
Walking the Labyrinth
Facing writer’s block? Looking for creative plot twists and turns? Wondering how you might develop a character? Need some time, space, and an activity to get your creative juices flowing or for an idea to gestate and mature? Consider walking a labyrinth while here at the conference.
This workshop will briefly explore the history of labyrinths, why a labyrinth and maze are not the same, the benefits of walking a labyrinth, and provide participants the opportunity to walk a 24-foot seven-circuit Chartres style labyrinth painted on canvas and then, as time permits, to share “ah ha” moments and ask questions.
Rajia Hassib is the author of two novels, In the Language of Miracles (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and A Pure Heart. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Literary Hub. She teaches English and creative writing at Marshall University.
Workshops:
Plot: How to Structure a Character-Driven Narrative
Whether you have a story that needs to be revised or an idea for a story that you haven’t yet started, you should think about plot and structure—how to turn the story into a structured narrative that has momentum and that engages readers from the start. In this workshop, we will use a piece of flash fiction to look at plot through a lens of causality, and then we will write an exercise inspired by the model story. Come prepared to write something new or revise an existing story.
Writing Effective Dialogue
Dialogue is more than the words the characters say. When done well, dialogue propels the story forward, characterizes everyone, and keeps readers hooked. It is also an inherent part of the scene and, as such, part of the action. This workshop will cover strategies to improve dialogue in fiction or creative nonfiction. We will review examples of effective lines of dialogue, analyze their functions and effects, and practice these skills in a writing exercise.
Laura Jackson is an environmental writer and humorist. Her essays and humor have appeared in many places, and her essay collection, Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, & Finding Your Way in West Virginia was named the 2025 Book of the Year by the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia. She lives in Wheeling with her husband (President Emeritus Brad Mills) and their sons.
Workshops: Humor and Outdoor
What's So Funny?
Learn to write humor and how it can help writers deliver messages—even serious ones—in any genre or subject.
Thoreau-ly Wild Nature Writing
Take your writing practice outdoors. We'll meet at the upper pond to do some breathing exercises, practice observation skills, freewriting, short poetry forms, etc. Bring something to sit on if you need it. In case of inclement weather, we'll meet the under the shelter at Jackson.
Jason Kapcala is a novelist from Morgantown, West Virginia, and the author of two books, including Hungry Town (West Virginia University Press, 2022), a silver medalist in the 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards, described as “taut and powerful” by Publisher’s Weekly. He has published more than forty stories, essays, and poems, in numerous magazines and journals, including BlueLine, Summerset Review, Santa Clara Review, Saw Palm, Cleaver Magazine, Long Story Short, Four Way Review, Canyon Voices, Masque and Spectacle, Prime Number, and The Good Men Project, and his writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He received his graduate writing education at Ohio University, and has been teaching creative writing in the community for the past twenty years.
Workshops: Fiction
Say What, Now?: Crafting Dialogue
Dialogue is not real speech, but it has to trick the reader into believing that it is. There are many traps writers can fall into when writing dialogue, but if when done well, dialogue is often the heart of the story, revealing character, defining place, and driving scene. This workshop focuses on what’s said (and what isn’t said), as well as how characters say what they say. We will look at examples, discuss some practical guidelines for crafting powerful dialogue, and practice what we learn.
Writing Against Type: Subverting Genre
Genre writing sometimes gets a bad rap, but at the end of the day, all writing is genre writing, whether it’s mystery, horror, or romance, or whether its literary fiction or even Appalachian storytelling. Over-reliance on genre conventions leads to clichéd writing, one reason why so many books sound like carbon copies of each other. This workshop will focus on how to subvert genre conventions to create fresh reader experiences. This can happen in a number of ways (and to various degrees), and we will look at everything from straight parody to homage as we think about new ways to breathe fresh life into the genres of our choosing.
Joint workshop with Jason Kapcala with Renée Nicholson: Literary Friendship
He Said, She Said: Building a Literary Friendship that Improves Your Writing Life
Every writer needs a reader—a productive literary friendship built on mutual respect and genuine investment in each other's success. Readers create a safe space, providing honest but generous feedback on rough drafts and half-formed ideas to help a writer see not just what isn't working but what their writing might become. They celebrate each other's achievements with authentic joy, actively promote each other's work, and provide invaluable perspective during periods of doubt and rejection. Renée K. Nicholson and Jason Kapcala have been reading each other’s writing for 20 years and will discuss how writers can build and nurture these lasting friendships, as well as how to become a reliable reader for someone else.
Gwendolyn Kiste is the four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, CrimeReads, Titan Books, The Lineup, and The Dark. She's a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror Award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Shirley Jackson, Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
Workshops: Fiction
It’s All in the Details: How to Use Specific Imagery to Enhance Character, Setting, and Theme in Your Writing
Specificity can be any author’s secret weapon--from the use of color and light to the choice of architecture, furniture, clothing, and even food, the appearance of your characters and their environment is crucial to crafting a memorable story. Likewise, metaphors and similes can be enhanced through precise and compelling images that imbue your writing with greater meaning. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to pick out the perfect details for your particular work as well as how to integrate those details to draw readers into your world and make the experience unforgettable.
Revisiting the When and Where: Crafting Unique Settings in Your Fiction
Setting can enhance the world of your story in ways that ensure your fiction feels fresh and inventive. In this workshop, we’ll explore the power of setting in literature and how you can use it to your best advantage when crafting your fiction. From reinventing familiar places to choosing underutilized time periods, attendees will leave feeling energized and ready to explore new places and periods in their own writing.
Michael Knost is a two-time Bram Stoker Award® winner who has written across multiple genres and edited dozens of anthologies. His Writers Workshop of Horror won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award® in England for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction, and its sequel, Writers Workshop of Horror 2, received the same honor in Denver in 2021. His Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an Amazon #1 bestseller.
Michael was awarded the Horror Writers Association’s Silver Hammer Award, and in 2021 he was named the organization’s Mentor of the Year. He has also received the prestigious J.U.G. (Just Uncommonly Good) Award from West Virginia Writers, Inc. and was recently inducted into the inaugural class of the Imagination Hall of Fame in July 2025.
His novel Return of the Mothman was adapted into a feature film, and he continues teaching writing classes and workshops. Michael lives in Chapmanville, West Virginia, with his wife and daughter.
Workshops: Fiction
Weaving Multiple Narratives into One Great Story
Learn the secrets of the Fractured Tandem narrative by mastering how to weave seemingly independent story threads into one cohesive, epic novel. This workshop provides a step-by-step guide to timing transitions and revealing hidden connections that make every plot line vital to the whole. Join us to transform complex, multi-layered ideas into a single, masterfully structured story.
What “Internal Dialogue” Really Means
Master the nuances of character interiority by exploring the spectrum between direct thought and free indirect discourse. This session demonstrates how to blend a narrator’s voice with a character’s consciousness to create a seamless "close third person" perspective without relying on distracting italics. Writers will learn to choose the right level of depth for every scene, ensuring their internal narrative feels natural, urgent, and masterfully integrated.
Amber (Decker) Koch grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, where she still lives and writes. She has performed her work in theaters, coffee shops, laundromats, dive bars, and record stores across the country—from New York to New Orleans to Portland to Los Angeles and back again.
She is a past recipient of the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, presented by LA's Cultural Weekly, and has served multiple times as a judge for the annual Poetry Superhighway contest. In 2024, she was invited to open for Barbara Kingsolver during the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s only tour stop of the year in Barboursville, West Virginia.
Her latest collection, Appalachian Gothic: Poems Inspired by the Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, explores Appalachian landscape, grief, and folklore in conversation with the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
Workshops:
Taking a Beautiful Risk: Embracing Vulnerability and the Confessional Voice
What would you write if you truly stopped worrying about what anyone else might think?
In this workshop, we’ll look to bold confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and other prolific writers who dared to place their most complicated truths on the page. Together, we’ll practice loosening the grip of shame and working to silence the inner voice that whispers “Don’t say that!"
Through generative prompts and discussion, we’ll focus on writing with radical honesty and allowing grief, anger, tenderness, desire, and contradiction to exist without apology. This is an invitation to step past self-censorship, to trust your voice, and to take the beautiful risk of telling the unabashed truth in your poems.
The Cliché Graveyard
Tired of poems full of broken hearts, dark nights of the soul, and feelings that are sharp as knives?
In this lively workshop, we’ll dig up tired metaphors, examine where clichés come from, and bury the phrases that no longer serve your work.
Through playful exercises and close reading of your own poems, you’ll learn how to replace worn-out language with vivid, surprising imagery that speaks to the real heart of what you’re trying to say.
Come ready to dig, dismantle, and resurrect your poems with language that feels alive again.
Renée K. Nicholson chases the muse across disciplines, including poetry, prose, and academic work. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, The Millions, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, and Bellevue Literary Review, and she is a contributing writer to the health humanities journal Synapsis. Her poetry collections include Feverdream, Postscripts, and Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center. Her nonfiction books include Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness and the award-winning anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives of Illness, Disability, and Medicine. Renée recently served as director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University (now emerita) and was the 2018 recipient of the Susan S. Landis Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the State of WV. She is a creative partner in Healthcare Is Human and Series Editor for Connective Tissue at WVU Press. She holds an BA in English/Creative Writing from Butler University, her MFA from West Virginia University, and a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in Morgantown and can be found online at www.reneenicholson.com.
Workshop: See Jason Kapcala above.
Edwina Pendarvis writes poems and essays mostly centered on Appalachian life and literature. Author of four poetry collections (most recently, Ghost Dance Poems) and author or co-author of nine nonfiction books (most recently Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia), she has contributed work to regional and national periodicals. Among her proudest accomplishments is a series of young-adult biographies of Nobel Prize winners, published in dual-language editions by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press She’s also proud to be a professor emeritus at Marshall University in Huntington, where she’s lived for the past forty years.
Workshops: Poetry and Creative Nonfiction
The Eight-Minute Mile: Density as an Element of Poetry
Given the limited space contemporary poetry typically occupies—typically from half a page to a couple of pages in journals and magazines—its power depends on density accomplished through associations with mystery (defined broadly as evoking a deep feeling. Participants in this session will discuss three poems (from different centuries) and how they evoke feeling through remote associations and then will consider a poem they’ve written or are writing and to what extent and how it evokes mystery.
From Socrates to Mr. Bones: Dialogue as an Approach to Creative Nonfiction
Creative nonfiction typically intends to inform as well as to entertain; and because nonfiction content is more limited by “facts” than fiction, it risks appealing only to those who are already interested and at least somewhat knowledgeable in its content. Participants in this session will discuss the creative possibilities of dialogue, whether classical or slapstick, to engage readers with relatively little interest in or knowledge about their subject and will try a short dialogue of their own related to a nonfiction project they’re working on or considering.
Cat Pleska is an award-winning author and educator. Her two memoirs are “Riding on Comets” (WVUP, 2015) and “My Life in Water” (Uncollected Press, 2024). She also has published numerous essays in literary magazines and is the editor of four anthologies. She teaches full time in the English Department at Marshall University and part time in the Graduate Humanities Department. She is the president and editor-in-chief of Mountain State Press and is a Wonder Woman, class of 2025. She lives in Scott Depot with her husband and five cats.
Workshops:
Exploration of the Self
You’re pretty sure you know who you are, right? Are you positive? Let’s put that to the test! The goal is to know thyself and then when you approach the page to write memoir or personal essay you might be surprised as to who shows up on the page. Let’s explore our many selves and then write to a prompt that reveals a deeper truth as to who you really are.
What’s This About? Figuring Out the Main Idea
When writing memoir or personal essay, we get the facts down, we use scenes to show what went on, we reflect as to what happened and what it meant—to you. Your writing is a collection of myriad elements: characters, events, relationships, illnesses, happy times, travel, growing up and so on; it’s about structure and beautiful language; it’s about chronology or now and then. But none of those alone are necessarily what the piece is ABOUT. Let’s write to some prompts then explore how we can discover the main idea or focus. Together, we’ll figure it out!
Bonnie Proudfoot’s writing focuses on the intersection of family roles, place, and identity. Her novel, Goshen Road (OU/ Swallow Press), about two sisters who live in rural WV, received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway. Her 2022 poetry chapbook, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig editions. Her fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. A full-length poetry collection, Incomer, based on moving to the Appalachian region, is forthcoming in Spring of 2026 on Shadelandhouse Modern Press.
Workshops: Short Form Writing
The Art of Expertise OR Know-How, Chops, Savvy, The Goods, The Skinny and The Low Down
What are you an “expert” at? What can you teach someone else? This generative writing workshop will use the notion that we have specialized knowledge - maybe from a job, a hobby, or just because we were raised, say, with family members who knew stuff, with dogs or horses or gardens, we are sibs, we have kids, or parents, etc. – we had to learn stuff to meet goals, or we had mentors. Tapping into our own expertise comes with its own familiar vocabulary and physical awareness that we can bring into our writing, which can make our voices as authors unique, and give a sense of unity to a short piece of fiction or essay or poem. We can teach others something of significance from our experience. Not everything we are “expert” at needs to be a remarkable achievement. It might be how to keep kids from fighting in the car, or a bank shot in pool, or something that seemed unattainable. Some folks can teach others about how “not” to do something, say how “not” to speak French, how “not” to ride a unicycle, un-mastery of a skill or sport.
Workshop: What’s at stake? Developing tension
Apologies, regrets, second chances, do-overs! In life or in writing, we often imagine ways our choices play out, how they create or limit possibility. In this workshop, we will consider ways to develop character and voice through the device of a turning point, a moment of revelation, a regret or a wish for a do-over. We'll consider how elements of narrative can be explored through voice, through the awareness of a character and discuss compelling story development that builds dramatic tension. This workshop will be useful for those working with narrative in poetry, memoir, creative non-fiction, or fiction.
Bastet Zyla is currently attending Oberlin College for creative writing. Other than several short stories, she has also written two novels, three plays, and countless poems. She has received many awards throughout her school career, such as the first place playwriting award two years in a row at the West Virginia State Thespian Festival, as well as being ranked multiple times in Wood Whispers, a yearly West Virginia writing collection.
Workshops: Youth Track: 6th to 12th Grades (Saturday Only)
FRIDAY NIGHT MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENT
Ananga Martin is an orange groves to Appalachia singer-songwriter living in West Virginia. She loves to explore the idea of “home.” She dreams strong, is deeply inspired by her inner and outer landscapes, and tries to understand how they are connected through songwriting and art. A mother and grandmother, Ananga can usually be found outside with the trees and plants, where she feels most open and held. She speaks best in song, and hopes her voice will contribute to the greater good and collective liberation of all living beings. She has released two albums, Moonlight & Fire (2019) and Santa Ana (2023).