Please join the Chautauqua Creative Writing Committee in celebrating the craft of writing! The committee is pleased to welcome Appalachian author Rae Garringer to speak before our awards ceremony. Rae (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on traditional S’atsoyaha and Šaawanwaki lands. Rae is the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024), which received a 2025 Stonewall Honor Book Award from the American Library Association, and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans & Two Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, 2025). When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, two-stepping around their trailer, and swimming in the river.