Poets Karen Paul Holmes and Brenda Kay Ledford to read at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, on Thursday, June 15, 2017

JOHN C. CAMPBELL FOLK SCHOOL

On Thursday, June 15, 2017 at 7:00 PM, John Campbell Folk School and North Carolina Writers' Network-West are sponsoring The Literary Hour, an hour of poetry and prose reading held at Keith House on the JCFS campus. This event is held regularly on the third Thursday the month. The reading is free of charge and the public is invited to attend. Poets Karen Paul Holmes and Brenda Kay Ledford will be the featured readers, both of which are widely published poets. This should be an excellent program and presents an exceptional opportunity to hear these two women read their poems, many of which are centered on the mountain area.

Karen Paul Holmes was selected for Best Emerging Poets, 2015 (Stay Thirsty Media), and her full-length poetry collection, Untying the Knot,was published by Aldrich Press in 2014 (available on Amazon.com). Her poems have appeared in journals, such as Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Poetry East, and Atlanta Review, and anthologies such as The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol 5: Georgia. Holmes serves as the Towns County Representative for the North Carolina Writers' Network-West, and is a member of the Georgia Poetry Society.

Formerly the VP-Communications at ING, Holmes now works as a freelance writer and teaches writing classes at John C. Campbell Folk School, Writers Circle, and elsewhere. She’s inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lake Chatuge, and her home in Hiawassee, GA. Holmes supports writers through a critique group she started in Atlanta, and the Writers Night Out she founded/hosts in Blairsville on the second Friday of every month.

Brenda Kay Ledford is a seventh-generational native of Clay County. She was an honor graduate of Hayesville High School, earned her Master of Arts in Education from Western Carolina University, and received a diploma of highest honors in creative writing from Stratford Career Institute.

Ledford’s work has appeared in many journals including Our State, Woman’s World, Country Extra, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Angels on Earth, 30 Old Mountain Press anthologies and Blue Ridge Parkway Silver Anniversary Edition coffee-table book.

Aldrich Press published her poetry book, Crepe Roses, that won the 2015 Paul Green Multimedia Award from North Carolina Society of Historians. Ledford has received this award nine times for her books, collecting oral history on Southern Appalachian and on her blogs: http://blueridgepoet.blogspot.com and http://historicalhayesville.blogspot.com.She also won the North Carolina Press Association’s Journalism Contest Award for her feature on the John C. Campbell Folk School in 1999.

Ledford is listed with A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, North Carolina Literary Map, North Carolina Storytelling Guild, and Who’s Who in America. She has appeared on the “Common Cup,” talk show on Windstream Communication’s cable television, and also was interviewed on “The Blue Sky Show” over WJUL/WJRB Radio Station and gives regional poetry readings.