Conference

Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote is a Zen Buddhist priest, writer, actor, and acclaimed documentary narrator. He has performed for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodóvar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderbergh, and Sidney Pollack. He co-hosted the Academy Awards with Billy Crystal in 2020 and is a two-time Emmy Award-winning narrator of more than 160 documentary films. His extensive narration work includes numerous films by Ken Burns, including The Roosevelts, The National Parks, Prohibition, The West, The Dust Bowl, Vietnam, and The History of Country Music. Coyote is also the author of five books, including the international bestseller Sleeping Where I Fall and The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education. His book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha draws on more than four decades of Zen Buddhist study and his work teaching acting, improvisation, and masks. Ordained a Zen priest in 2011, Coyote became an independent Zen teacher in 2015. He has long been active in political and social causes, particularly environmental protection, voting rights, election security, and nuclear issues.

Avery M. Guess

Avery Guess is a poet and creative nonfiction writer with a focus on disability, mental illness,and trauma/survivorship. She was the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Truth Is (Black Lawrence Press), and the chapbook, The Patient Admits (dancing girl press).
Avery has received two Artist Enrichment Grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She has been awarded residencies from the Edward Albee Foundation in New York, the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center in Minnesota, the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts in Tennessee. After moving every few years to a different state, Avery is happily settled near her family in Frankfort, where she lives with her very bouncy dog, Quigley.

Keith S. Wilson

Keith S. Wilson is a poet, game designer, and multimedia artist living in Chicago. He is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, Keith has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, the Millay Colony, and James Merrill House, among others. Wilson was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry. His second book, Games for Children (Milkweed Editions) was a winner of the National Poetry Series.

Wilson’s nonfiction has won an Indiana Review Nonfiction Prize and the Redivider Blurred Line Prize, and has been anthol

Lynnell Edwards

Readings Host

Lynnell Edwards is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent, The Bearable Slant of Light (Red Hen Press, 2024), which explores the burden and beauty of mental illness within one family and across generations of writers and artists. Her other books include This Great Green Valley, Covet, The Highwayman’s Wife, and The Farmer’s Daughter, as well as the chapbook Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop. Her poetry, short fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Plume, Another Chicago Magazine, New Madrid, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and her poetry has been featured on The Slowdown. Edwards is the recipient of a 2007 Al Smith Fellowship and a fellowship from The Hermitage in Sarasota, Florida. She serves as faculty in poetry for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, where she is also book reviews editor for Good River Review. She is a founding member and past president of Louisville Literary Arts and has served on the Kentucky Women Writers Conference Board of Directors. She holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition and an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Louisville.