2026 Creative Writing Festival Theme: Telling the Truth

Zach Dasher is a Christian, husband, dad, entrepreneur, and executive producer. He is CEO of Tread Lively, a film producer, a storyteller, and a podcaster (Not Yet Now, Youtube, Spotify, and elsewhere). With his wife Jill and friend Brandon, Zach’s Not Yet Now podcast engages life and faith issues in the tension of the “already, not yet” reality of God’s kingdom, featuring interviews with guests including William Lane Craig, Jon Tyson, Carl Trueman, and Jordan Hall. Zach’s most recent film is The Blind, a biopic of Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, and a forthcoming biopic is in the works of Randy Travis, entitled Forever and Ever, Amen.

Jennifer McGaha is the author of three works of creative nonfiction including The Joy Document, a collection of fifty essays celebrating midlife, Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read, and Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist. Her nonfiction and creative nonfiction work has also appeared in many magazines and literary journals including Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brevity, Bitter Southerner, Crab Creek Review, River Teeth, and others. An experienced workshop facilitator and writing coach, Jennifer has led workshops through Hugo House, Flatiron Writers Room, the North Carolina Arboretum, Story and Song Center for Arts and Culture, the Carl Sandburg National Historic Site, Kanuga Conference Center, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville, and many other places. She has also served as a featured reader, speaker, and moderator for literary events at public libraries, bookstores, writing programs, and other venues across the country. An Appalachian native, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, four unruly dogs, nine relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of chickens. See her website for more details.

Dale Neal is a novelist, teacher and journalist, living in Asheville. He is the author of Kings of Coweetsee, a contemporary Appalachian saga exploring the changes in a rural county when a ballot box from a stolen election suddenly reappears. His historical novel The Woman with the Stone Knife is told by a Cherokee woman exiled for 20 years in Georgian England. His novella, Floodmarks, about the 1916 flood in Asheville, is forthcoming from Regal House. His previous novels include Appalachian Book of the Dead, a Southern Buddhist thriller that was a finalist for the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. His short stories and essays have appeared in Our State, Smoky Mountain Living, North Carolina Literary Review, Carolina Quarterly and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. As an award-winning reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times for three decades, he traveled everywhere from Upper Paw Paw in Madison County to Karachi in Pakistan, covering culture, books, religion, business, science and technology. He also taught graduate-level creative writing at the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Asheville campus. When he’s not writing, he walks with his wife and two dogs on the banks of the French Broad River. See his website for more details.

Register using the Single Registration Form if you are a student, parent/caretaker, or a member of the community. If you are registering multiple people within your party, you may do so using this form by clicking “Add Another Attendee.”

Register using the Group Registration Form if you are a school group leader registering yourself and your group of high school students.