Tennessee writers gathering April 4-6 in Oak Ridge

Tennessee Mountain Writers will celebrate its 35th annual conference with the theme “Rising to Write,” April 4-6 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Oak Ridge.

The conference will encompass workshops, writing contest awards, networking, manuscript evaluations, publishers, editors, book signings, a bookstore, and more.

Susan O’Dell Underwood will lead the poetry workshop and will be the keynote speaker at the awards banquet, the concluding event of the conference. Underwood recently retired from 33 years of teaching at Carson-Newman University, where she taught courses in creative writing, Appalachian literature, and genre studies.

Besides two chapbooks, she has two full-length volumes of poetry − “The Book of Awe” (Iris Press, 2018) and “Splinter,” released in 2023 by Madville Publishing, which also published her novel “Genesis Road.” Her poems, essays, and stories appear in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Ecotone, Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Vol. 6.

Other featured guests:

• Jim Minick will lead the nonfiction workshop and the general session. Minick is the author or editor of eight books and co-editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
• Pamela Schoenewaldt will lead the fiction workshop. She is in the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame and was Writer in Residence at UT Libraries. She lives in Knoxville.
• Susan Eaddy will lead the Young People’s Literature workshop. Eaddy writes picture books and plays with modeling clay in her attic studio. She has won international 3D illustration awards and a Grammy nomination. 

Specialty sessions will be conducted by Rhea Carmon, Healing Pain with Your Pen; Denton Loving, The Ins and Outs of Submissions and Contest Entries; Fred Sauceman, Writing for Magazines; Steve Wildsmith, Social Media for Writers; and a panel discussion, Confronting Imposter Syndrome for Writers, will be conducted by Chrissie Anderson Peters, Sharon Shadrick, and Sharon Waters.