Contact: Sharon Fisher
January 18, 2008

MECC Foundation announces the 32nd Annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival

The Mountain Empire Community College Foundation announces the 32nd Annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival to be held on Wednesday, April 2nd from 10 a.m. to 12 noon in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. This year’s event will be dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Fox’s novel, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. The festival will be held in the Goodloe Center, located in Phillips-Taylor Hall on the campus of MECC. It will feature readings by featured authors Gwyn Hyman Rubio and Kathy Shearer, as well as the announcement of the winners of the John Fox, Jr. Festival poetry and short story contests in the middle school, high school, and adult categories.

Rubio is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection Icy Sparks. Her second novel, The Woodman’s Daughter, has also received critical praise. Rubio’s collection of short stories, Sharing Power, was nominated for a Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award, and her short story “Little Saint” received the Cecil Hackney Literary Award for first prize in the National Short Story Competition. The author lives in Versailles, KY, with her husband of 30 years, Angel.

Shearer has lived in southwest Virginia for more than 30 years, and is the author and publisher of a number of books focusing on the coalfield region. She operates the Clinch Mountain Press from her home in Emory, VA, specializing in oral histories, memoirs, poetry, and vintage photography from the Appalachian region of Virginia. She is the author of Wilder Days: Coal Town Life on Dumps Creek and Memories from Dante: The Life of a Coal Town, and is currently working on a community history of Cleveland, Virginia.

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