MECC Foundation to Host 50th Anniversary John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival Featuring Author Jeannette Walls
MECC Foundation to Host 50th Anniversary John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival Featuring Author Jeannette Walls Entries Sought for Lonesome Pine Short-Story and Poetry Contests
Big Stone Gap, VA -- The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 50th anniversary John Fox, Jr. Literary Festivalfeaturing New York Times best-selling authors Silas House and Beth Macy and moderator Amy Clark on Wednesday, March 11 from 10 a.m. to noon. The festival is free and open to the public and school groups are welcome to attend.
In coordination with the festival event, the MECC Foundation will host the 40th Annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 23rd Annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest. The deadline for submitting entries is Monday, February 23at 4:30 p.m. Entry categories include adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), and middle school (grades 6 through 8). Contest rules and information about the festival is available on the MECC Foundation website at https://www.mecc.edu/jffestival/. Winners of the contest will be announced during the Literary Festival Event. All winners will receive a cash prize.
Following the author discussion, the MECC Foundation will feature a special luncheon with House, Macy, and Clark at the John Fox Jr. Home in Big Stone Gap beginning at 12:45 p.m. Tickets for the luncheon are $30 and can be ordered by calling the MECC Foundation office at 276-523-7466. Tickets are extremely limited, so please reserve early for this event
Silas House is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the novels Clay’s Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012, Southernmost, 2018, and Lark Ascending, 2022, as well as a book of creative nonfiction Something’s Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and four plays. 2025 sees the publication of his first book of poetry, All These Ghosts, and his first murder-mystery (under the pseudonym S.D. House), Dead Man Blues.
Beth Macy is a Virginia-based journalist who writes about outsiders and underdogs. She is the award-winning author of three New York Times-bestselling books examining communities left behind by corporate greed and political indifference. Her first book, Factory Man, explored the aftermath of globalization on rural communities and won a J. Anthony Lukas Prize. Dopesick, her investigation of the opioid crisis, was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, and was described as a “masterwork of narrative nonfiction” by The New York Times. Dopesick was made into a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hulu series on which Macy served as an executive producer and cowriter. Her most recent book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is a combination memoir and reported analysis of the rural-urban divide told through the lenses of backward mobility, political polarization, and the decimation of local news.
Amy Clark is Professor of Rhetoric and Applied Linguistics at UVA's College at Wise, and Co-Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies. She is co-editor and author of the book Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community (University Press of Kentucky, 2013.) She is host and producer of the podcast Talking Appalachian (recently featured in The Atlantic,), and her writing about the region and its dialects has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Oxford American, and Harvard University Press blog.
For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.