BARTRAM 250

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | Franklin, NC

Lazy Hiker Brewing | Franklin, NC

Big Bear Shelter | Franklin, NC

Tellico Creek | Needmore, NC

Russell Bridge | Rabun County, GA

Warwoman Dell | Rabun County, GA

Wayah Bald | NC

Lazy Hiker Brewing Co. | Franklin, NC

Wallace Branch Trailhead | Franklin, NC

Alarka Laurel | Bryson City, NC

Needmore Tract | NC

Standing Indian Campground | NC

Jones Gap | NC

Scaly Mountain | Highlands, NC

Otto, NC

Sanderstown Beach, NC

Lazy Hiker Brewing Co. | Franklin, NC

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | Franklin, NC

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | Franklin, NC

Queen Branch | Franklin, NC

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | NC
RSVP for a $10 plate made by Jenn Tufts

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | NC

Julie Best (MFA) is originally from upstate NY and moved to Clayton, GA in 2012 after living in New York City, Savannah, GA, and Dahlonega, GA. When she arrived at her remote home in the north Georgia mountains, she introduced herself and her dogs to the plants, mushrooms, and trees that surrounded the cabin that she shared with her husband. And that is where her interest in, and love of, nature began.
In 2019 Julie produced a series of paintings called The Floating Animal series, which captured the forest around her home (via plein air oil painting) with the animals of Appalachia depicted in hovering and flying through their habitat. These paintings, seemingly whimsical at first sight, have a haunting undertone. They ask the question: “what is the responsibility of humanity to nature and its preservation?” As technological pursuits increase andextend (referencing McLuhan’s observation that all technology is merely an extension of man) should our responsibility and awareness to its effects also extend? And if so, how do we achieve a balance that will prevent a disconnection, a floating away, from our origins as part of the natural world?

Sarah “Dangerwood” Rose (MFA) is a mother, outdoorswoman, and wildlife artist based in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Her work explores the relationships between humans, animals, and the living landscape through mixed traditional media, including inks and raw natural pigments. Informed by footage from trail camera traps placed in the semi-urban forest near her home, her pieces create a dialogue with the persistent wildness in developed landscapes and the presence of more-than-human intelligences. Sarah also teaches, volunteers with local environmental organizations, and cohosts The Campfire’s Edge, a podcast documenting uncanny encounters with the wild. You can find more of her work at SarahDangerwood.com

Kaye Savage (PhD) is an artist and educator with interests in connections between science, art, and nature. She works primarily with photography and handmade paper. As an environmental studies faculty member at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, she teaches courses that are grounded in the sciences but reach across disciplines. Her technical background in environmental geochemistry informs her fascination with interplays of processes across multiple scales of time and space. Her current project is focused on the ecological impacts of climate change.

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | NC

John Lane is professor emeritus of environmental studies at Wofford College. A 2014 inductee into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, his books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He is also coeditor of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia), and he has published numerous volumes of poetry, essays, and novels. Coming into Animal Presence is his most recent work. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Rose McLarney’s collections of poems are Colorfast, Forage, and Its Day Being Gone, from Penguin Poets, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. Her book of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry, is forthcoming from LSU Press. She is co-editor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, from University of Georgia Press, and the journal Southern Humanities Review. Rose has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences; served as Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place; and is winner of the National Poetry Series, the Chaffin Award for Achievement in Appalachian Writing, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry, among other prizes. Her work has appeared in publications including American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Oxford American. Currently, she is Lanier Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University.

Sydney Kale is a Ph.D. student of Wisdom Studies at Ubiquity University, focusing on plant intelligence and phenomenology. Her plant-relationship practice culminates in an exploration of co-authorship with plants in both academic and creative works. While her primary focus is plant studies, these inquiries provide a lens to explore plantness, humanness, and aliveness through deep listening, attunement, and embodied knowing. She is the author of The Love Language of Plants, a collection of essays written with plants at her home in Asheville, North Carolina. She also publishes a blog sharing her curiosities about the felt experience of being a human and a plant in a non-academic creative forum.

Cowee School Arts & Heritage Center | Franklin, NC

Asheville based filmmaker Garret Martin spent 9 months of 2023 filming at Mountain Gardens. The result a feature documentary, PARADISE, follows an iconic mountain man, Joe Hollis, who has lived off the grid for fifty years at the foot of the highest mountains in the East. Creating what he calls a “paradise garden”, his land boasts over a thousand different species including many that can’t be found anywhere else in the country. As health problems arise, Joe struggles to ensure his land and legacy survive into the future.

Lazy Hiker Brewing Co. | Franklin, NC