Sevierville’s Rose Glen Literary Festival

Robert Beatty, author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Serafina series, will be the keynote speaker at the 2019 Rose Glen Literary Festival in Sevierville, Tennessee.

The literary festival is an annual event held the last Saturday in February that features presentations, a panel discussion and a writing workshop as well as a luncheon and keynote speaker. 

The 2019 festival is February 23 at the Sevierville Convention Center.

The festival idea was conceived by the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce in 2010 to give exposure to local authors, allowing them an opportunity to sell and sign books, meet their readers and network with fellow writers.

Beatty’s Serafina books are spooky mystery-thrillers about a brave and unusual girl who lives secretly in the basement of the grand Biltmore Estate surrounded by the opulence of the Gilded Age and the rugged beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  

Serafina and the Black Cloak has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 60 weeks and won the prestigious 2016 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize. The second book in the series, Serafina and the Twisted Staff, became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller in the first week of its launch and earned a “Starred Review” from Kirkus Reviews which said, “Even better than its predecessor, a sequel that delivers nonstop thrills from beginning to end.” The third book in the series, Serafina and the Splintered Heart, came out in 2017 to much acclaim. 

Willa of the Wood, Beatty’s fourth book, introduced a brand-new heroine—a young forest girl with ancient magical powers who lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.  

Beatty lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his wife and three daughters who help create and refine his stories. He loves to explore the historic Biltmore Estate and the darkened forest trails where his novels take place. He writes full-time now, but in his past lives Beatty was one of the pioneers of cloud computing, the founder/CEO of Plex Systems, the co-founder of Beatty Robotics, and the chairman/CTO of Narrative Magazine. In 2007, he was named an Entrepreneur of the Year. 

Other participating authors

Ben Anderson is the author of Smokies Chronicles: A Year of Hiking in Smoky Mountains National Park, that provides a fresh look and an engaging narrative about our most heavily visited national park through the eyes and ears of a lifelong devotee. He was media relations director at Warren Wilson College from 1997 to 2015. Before that he was assistant professor of mass communications at Florida Southern College. He worked as a journalist at several regional newspapers, and has been a backcountry volunteer for Great Smoky Mountains National Park for more than 20 years. He now does marketing and public relations work for the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation in Asheville. A native of Atlanta, he also lives in Asheville. Anderson’s Smokies Chronicle hikes have been excerpted in Smoky Mountain Living.  

Stephen Lyn Bales is a naturalist at Ijmas Nature Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. He has written for Smithsonian Magazine and is a regular contributor to the Tennessee Conservationist magazine. Bales is also a regular speaker at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge and other venues. His first book, Natural Histories, was published by University of Tennessee Press and covered the natural history of East Tennessee. Bales’ second book, Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941, is the compelling story of Jim Tanner and his field work on the ‘Lord God Bird’ in the late 1930s.

David Brill is the author of Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Misdeeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He has spent decades writing about the Smokies. Brill, an adjunct instructor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism, has been writing and working with the Great Smoky Mountains Association since 2006, while his devotion to the park goes back further than that.

Bill Carey is a columnist for Tennessee Magazine and founder of Tennessee History for Kids, a non-profit organization that helps teachers of social studies and Tennessee history improve and supplement their core curriculum. His 2000 book Fortunes Fiddles and Fried Chicken: A Nashville Business History is one of the bestselling Nashville history books of all time. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, spent five years flying in the navy, and has lived in Nashville since 1992. His latest book, Runaways, Coffles and Fancy Girls: A History of Slavery in Tennessee, is a two-strike gut punch—first at the level of the historic humanitarian tragedy that was slavery, and second at our inability to learn from history that there is no “not that bad” way to destroy families.

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 18 books, including How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, poetry from Black Widow Press. She is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She has translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems, Péret’s The Big Game, and co-translated Chantal Bizzini’s Disenchanted City. Her other volumes include children’s books, essays, anthologies of women’s literature. Dr. Kallet is professor emerita at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years. For a decade, she has also lead poetry workshops for VCCA-France, in Auvillar. She has performed her poems on campuses and in theaters across the United States as well as in France and Poland, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. 

Bill Landry is the author of a new book, When Tennessee was the West. He was the voice, host, narrator, and co-producer of The Heartland Series which aired on WBIR-TV for about 30 years. Since its beginning in 1984, over 1,900 short features were produced, including 150 half-hour specials. Bill wrote, produced, and acted in many of the episodes. Receiving an MFA from Trinity University at the Dallas Theater Center and a BA in literature from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Bill has earned two Emmy Awards for directing The Heartland Series, the Education in Appalachia Award from Carson-Newman University, and an honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Lincoln Memorial University.

Courtney Lix is the author of No Place for the Weary Kind: Women of the Smokies, a book that articulates the stories of 19 women of substance with strong ties to the Smoky Mountain region. Lix grew up in Gatlinburg. She is the author of two books about the mountains and is a regular contributor to Smokies Life Magazine. Her writing awards include the Ferris Prize for Journalism from Princeton University, the Gregory T. Pope Prize for Science Writing, and recognition of FAQ Bears as the best general interest publication by the Association of Partners for Public Lands in 2011. She lives in Washington DC.

Jack Neely is a journalist who has been writing about the character and heritage of his hometown for many years. After graduating from the University of Tennessee—where he studied American history—Neely was an Egyptian museum tour guide at the 1982 World’s Fair. Later he was a criminal-defense investigator and an assistant editor for a national fiction magazine. Since his column, “Secret History” debuted in 1992, he’s been known mainly as a Knoxville journalist with a particular interest in the city’s unique culture and heritage. He now writes for the Knoxville Mercury, a weekly column called “The Scruffy Citizen.” He has written several books about Knoxville and its history, most recently The Tennessee Theatre: A Grand Entertainment Palace (2015); Knoxville, Tennessee: Green by Nature (2014); Market Square: A History of the Most Democratic Place on Earth, and Knoxville, Tennessee: This Obscure Prismatic City (2009).

Terry Roberts’ debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and his second novel, That Bright Land, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award as well as the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. Both novels won the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given to the author of the best novel written by a North Carolinian. Born and raised near Weaverville, North Carolina, Roberts is the Director of the National Paideia Center and lives in Asheville. He has three children: Jesse, Margaret, and Henry. Roberts’ third novel, The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival, was published in August.

Catlin Hamilton Summie is the former marketing director of MacMurray & Beck and of BlueHen Books/Penguin Putnam. At each company she also managed imprint profile and directed all publicity, hardcover and paperback. In addition, for nearly two years she simultaneously directed and handled sales nationwide for MacMurray & Beck. In 2003, she founded Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity LLC, an independent book publicity and marketing firm. Over the course of her career, in-house and solo, she has launched Susan Vreeland, Emily St. John Mandel, William Gay, Kim Church, Bren McClain and many more. She has published both short stories and poems. Her short story collection, To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts (Fomite Press), earned excellent reviews nationwide. It won silver in the Foreword INDIES Books of the Year Awards in Short Stories, was a June 2018 Pulpwood Queen Book Club Bonus Book, and was included in 35 Over 35’s Annual List in 2017.  She is a former independent bookseller who earned her degrees at Smith College and Colorado State University where she was awarded an MFA with distinction.

Sam Venable is a semi-retired humor columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel. The winner of numerous writing awards, he is the author of 10 books. The newest collection is called Someday I May Find Honest Work, A Newspaper Humorist’s Life. In his latest book, Venable chronicles life and all the strange and absurd things that go with it. With his lively commentary and quirky observations, he brings an uncommon perspective to common experiences. But even as he describes these trials and tribulations, Venable admits—with what you can be certain is a big grin—”it sure beats workin’ for a living.” 

A gathering for book lovers

Because it created an allure of southern literary gentility while raising dialog about a once widely known residence that had fallen into disrepair, Rose Glen was chosen as the name for the literary festival that has grown into a regional event spotlighting bestselling authors.

The first festival was held at Walters State Community College Sevier County campus. After four years the event had outgrown the college and relocated to the Sevierville Convention Center.

Sevierville’s 10th annual Rose Glen Literary Festival will offer a venue for some of the southern Appalachian region’s best writers to sell and sign books while also featuring innovative programming from nationally recognized authors.

Additional authors will be available to meet the public and sign copies of their works throughout the event, and Smoky Mountain Living will also be there. All activities are free to the public except for the luncheon, which is $20 per person. Visit roseglenfestival.com for program schedule information. For luncheon reservations, contact the Sevierville Chamber of Commerce at 865.453.6411 or email at cmcmahan@scoc.org.