Mountain

Heritage Literary Festival Staff

Patrick Wensink, Director (He/Him)

Patrick Wensink is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Lincoln Memorial University and Director of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. He is the bestselling author of several books, including Fake Fruit Factory (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2015), which was named one of the best novels of the year by NPR. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Esquire, Oxford American and many others. He lives in Cumberland Gap, TN with his son.

MHLF Teachers

Larry Thacker

Larry Thacker is a Kentuckian writer, artist, educator, and reality show actor living in Johnson City, TN. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction. A few of his titles include Working it off in Labor Country: Stories (West Virginia Press; 2021) and the poetry collection Gateless Menagerie (Unsolicited Press; 2021). He is a veteran of the US Army and a seventh generation native of the Cumberland Gap area. He also co-stars in the Netflix reality show, Swap Shop.

Minda Honey

Minda Honey’s essays on politics and relationships have appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. Her debut memoir, THE HEARTBREAK YEARS (Little A; 2023), is a hilarious and intimate portrait of a Black woman finding who she is and who she wants to be, one bad date at a time.

Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel, The Devil Takes You Home (Hachette; 2022), among others. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. He's been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University's online MFA program.

Sarah Strickley

Sarah Anne Strickley is the author of the short story collection, Incendiary Devices (Tolsun Books, 2023); the novella, Sister (Summer Camp Publishing, 2021); and the short story collection, Fall Together (Gold Wake Press, 2018). She’s a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowship, an Ohio Arts grant, a Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters, the Copper Nickel Editors’ Prize for Prose and other honors. Her stories and essays have appeared in Oxford American, A Public Space, Witness, Harvard Review, Gulf Coast, The Southeast Review, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Hotel Amerika, Copper Nickel, storySouth and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She’s a term Assistant Professor of creative writing at the University of Louisville and serves as faculty editor of Miracle Monocle, UofL’s award-winning literary journal. She lives in Kentucky with her husband, the writer Ian Stansel, and their children.

Ian Stansel

Ian Stansel is the author of the short story collections Glossary for the End of Days (Acre Books, 2020) and Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters, 2013), a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the novel The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous venues such as Ploughshares, Salon, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A native of the Chicago area, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Houston. He currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, the writer Sarah Strickley, and their two daughters.

Staff