About the Festival
The Emory & Henry Literary Festival began in 1982 with a program devoted to Sherwood Anderson, who spent the final fifteen years of his life in nearby Smyth County, Virginia. Since that inaugural occasion the festival has honored a living writer with strong ties to the Appalachian region, an author who comes to campus for a reading and a public interview and who listens to two or three papers about her/his work.
The proceedings of each festival, along with some new writing by the featured author, are published in an annual issue of the College's Iron Mountain Review. Eight of the essays from these festivals were reprinted in An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature (2005). The interviews conducted at the festivals from 1983 - 2003 have been reprinted by the University of Tennessee Press in Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South (2006).
Authors David Huddle, Lee Smith, Gurney Norman, Sharyn McCrumb, and Denise Giardina during a panel discussion at the 2006 Literary Festival.