SYLVA – The Jackson County Public Library in downtown Sylva will host two award-winning authors who are also English teachers at Swain County High School on Tuesday, Aug. 28 at 7p.m. Dawn Gilchrist-Young and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an EBCI tribal member, will each read from their novels, which are currently in progress.
Annette Clapsaddle, EBCI tribal member, is scheduled to read her novel in progress at the Jackson County Public Library on Aug. 28. (Photo courtesy of Jackson County Public Library)
Gilchrist-Young will read from a draft novel that is based on her prize-winning short story, “The Tender Branch.” That story won Gilchrist-Young the 2011 High School Teachers Writing Award from the Norman Mailer Center, co-sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. Part of that award was a month-long writer’s retreat at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, from where she has just returned.
Gilchrist-Young, who lives in Cullowhee, was raised in Swain County and is chair of the English department at Swain County High School. She will be joined at the Jackson County Public Library by another member of the school’s faculty, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, of Cherokee, who will read from her novel-in-progress, entitled “Sololoneet,” which won the 2012 Morning Star Award for Creative Fiction from the Native American Literature Symposium and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.
While an assistant to Principal Chief Michell Hicks, Clapsaddle produced “Cherokee Elders: Our Greatest Generation” and a series of children’s books including: “The Elder Tree,” “True Blue,” and “What Wonders.” Her recent work includes “It All Comes Out in the Wash,” published in Appalachian Heritage Quarterly, as well as a contribution to the serial novel, “Naked Came the Leaf Peeper.” Clapsaddle, who is from Cherokee, teaches English and Cherokee studies at Swain County High School, where she also coaches basketball.
Both authors will read from their work and take questions from the audience. This program is co-sponsored by the Friends of the Jackson County Public Library.
Info: Jackson County Public Library 586-2016.
– Jackson County Public Library
