Archive for category: Announcements

Entries Sought for Lonesome Pine Short-Story and Poetry Contests

Big Stone Gap, VA — The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 49th annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival featuring New York Times best-selling author Jeannette Walls, on Wednesday, March 12 from 10 a.m. to noon. The festival is free and open to the public.

In coordination with the festival event, the MECC Foundation will host the 39th Annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 22^nd Annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest. For the first time ever, the MECC Foundation will also host a writing contest for elementary age students. The deadline for submitting entries is Monday, February 24 at 4:30 p.m. Entry categories include adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), middle school (grades 6 through 8) and elementary (K-5) categories.  Contest rules and information about the festival is available on the MECC Foundation website at https://www.mecc.edu/jffestival/. Winners of the contest will be announced during the Literary Festival Event. All winners will receive a cash prize.

The 49^th Annual John Fox, Jr. festival will have a featured discussion from Walls. Following the presentation, the MECC Foundation will feature a special luncheon with House at the John Fox Jr. home in Big Stone Gap beginning at 12:30 p.m. Tickets for the luncheon are $30 and can be ordered by calling the MECC Foundation office at 276-523-7466. Tickets are limited, so please reserve early for this event.

Jeannette Walls, who is originally from Phoenix and grew up moving around the country with her family, is the bestselling author of The Glass Castle, a memoir that recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic upbringing. The Glass Castle has been a New York Times bestseller for over eight years and was named one of the top 10 books of the decade by Amazon. In 2017, The Glass Castle was made into a movie starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, and Naomi Watts. Walls is also the author of two other New York Times bestsellers, The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review. Walls was the recipient of the Christopher Award, the Books for Better Living Award, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Her newest book, Hang The Moon, was published in March 2023 and was named a LibraryReads Pick for March 2023 and a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Oprah Daily, Elle, and LitHub.

Hailed as one of the world’s most gifted storytellers, Walls has been sharing her remarkable story of resilience and redemption with audiences since The Glass Castle was first published in 2005. Her memoir documents her and her siblings’ unconventional upbringing, detailing a childhood spent in extreme poverty and chaos with parents who, despite their flaws, taught them to embrace life fearlessly. She continues to captivate audiences with her incredible story and offers a unique perspective on how to overcome unimaginable obstacles, confront challenges, and pursue a life of authenticity.

Walls graduated from Barnard College, which she was able to attend through a combination of grants, scholarships, and a year spent answering phones on Wall Street. She has written for New York magazine, Esquire, and MSNBC, and has appeared on The Today Show, Primetime, and The Colbert Report. After many years in New York, Walls currently lives with her husband in rural Virginia.

For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.

-MECC Foundation-

Big Stone Gap, VA – The Mountain Empire Community College Foundation will host the 2023 Winter Gala on Saturday, December 2 at 6:30 p.m. at the Mountain Empire Community College Goodloe Center.

Proceeds from the event will go towards the newly created Wise County Endowed Scholarship. This year’s event will feature a dinner reception, locally sourced wine, beer and refreshments, a silent auction, dancing, and entertainment.

About 75 percent of all 2022 high school graduates in Wise County enrolled in MECC. In 2023, MECC has experienced an enrollment growth in the number of Wise County students, both high school graduates and returning adult students, in career and academic transfer programs. Scholarships are needed to help students achieve educational and career goals while lessening the financial burden of families.

Tickets for the event are $125 per couple and can be purchased by mail or by contacting MECC Foundation Coordinator of Philanthropy Megan Gibson at 276.523.9078 or by email at mgibson@mecc.edu. Additional sponsorship is available below.

Bronze Sponsor – $500-$999

• Name of individual(s) or organization will be

listed in the Sponsor section of event program.

• Recognition at the event
• Two (2) complimentary tickets to the event

Silver Sponsor – $1,000 – $2,499

• Name of individual(s) or organization will be

listed in the Sponsor section of event program.

• Recognition at the event
• Four (4) complimentary tickets to the event

Gold Sponsor – $2,500 – $4,999

• Name of individual(s) or organization will be

listed in the Sponsor section of event program.

• Recognition at the event
• Ten (10) complimentary tickets to the event

Platinum Sponsor – $5,000 and above

• Name of individual(s) or organization will be

listed in the Sponsor section of event program.

• Recognition at the event
• Twenty (20) complimentary tickets to the event

For more information on the Wise County Endowed Scholarship or to donate to this fund, call the MECC Foundation office at 276.523.7480

Big Stone Gap, VA — The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 47th annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival, a free virtual event featuring New York Times bestselling author Silas House, Wednesday, March 15 from 10 a.m. to noon. The festival is free and open to the public.

In coordination with the festival event, the MECC Foundation will host the 36th Annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 19th Annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest. The deadline for submitting entries is Tuesday, February 28 at 4:30 p.m. Entry categories include adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), and middle school (grades 5 through 8) categories. Contest rules are available at the bottom of this page. Winners of the contest will be announced during the Literary Festival Event. All winners will receive a cash prize. For contest rules, visit https://www.meccfoundation.org/john-fox-jr-festival.

The 47th Annual John Fox, Jr. festival will return to a live format in 2023, with a featured discussion on House’s latest novel, Lark Ascending. Following House’s presentation, the MECC Foundation will feature a special luncheon with House at the John Fox Jr. home in Big Stone Gap beginning at 12:30 p.m. Tickets for the luncheon are $30 and can be ordered by calling the MECC Foundation office at 276-523-7466. Tickets are limited, so please reserve early for this event.

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books whose work frequently appears in The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a former commentator for NPR and his work has been widely published in journals and magazines such as Time, The Advocate, Oxford American, Garden & Gun, and many others. He has lectured internationally and is widely regarded as one of the major writers of the American South.

House was born and grew up in Southeastern Kentucky. House’s first novel, Clay’s Quilt (2001), is now known as a foundational text for Appalachian Literature. Its two companion novels, A Parchment of Leaves (2003) and The Coal Tattoo (2005), were recently re-issued in new editions and are now known as The Appalachian Trilogy. House wrote Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (2009) with Jason Howard. House’s fourth novel, Eli the Good (2009) emerged as a number one bestseller on the Southern lists and received the first annual Storylines Prize from the New York Public Library system, an award given to a book for use in the ESL and literacy programs of New York City. Same Sun Here (2012), co-written with Neela Vaswani, has received more than a dozen awards including the Nautilus, the Parents Choice, the E.B. White Honor Book Award, and many others. In 2018 his novel Southernmost appeared on Best of the Year lists of many magazines and was given the Weatherford Award and long listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. House has also written three plays that have been produced throughout the country.

In 2020 House received the highest honor for an artist in the Commonwealth of Kentucky when he was given the Governor’s Award for the Arts. He has also won the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Judy Gaines Young Award, the Intellectual Freedom Prize, the Caritas Medal, three honorary doctorates, and many other honors. In 2021 he was chosen as the Appalachian of the Year by a poll conducted by the podcast Appodlachia.

House served as a writer-in-residence at Eastern Kentucky University in 2004 and 2005 and at Lincoln Memorial University from 2005 to 2010. At LMU he also directed the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. In 2010 House became the NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. He has served on the fiction faculty at the Naslund Mann Graduate School of Writing since 2005. House is also an editor at the University Press of Kentucky’s Fireside Industries imprint.

His latest work, Lark Ascending, has received critical praise. As fires devastate most of the United States, Lark and his family secure a place on a refugee boat headed to Ireland, the last country not yet overrun by extremists and rumored to be accepting American refugees. But Lark is the only one to survive the trip, and once ashore, he doesn’t find the safe haven he’d hoped for. As he runs for his life, Lark finds an abandoned dog who becomes his closest companion, and then a woman in search of her lost son. Together they form a makeshift family and attempt to reach Glendalough, a place they believe will offer protection. But can any community provide the safety that they seek?

For readers of novels such as Station Eleven, The Dog Stars, and Migrations, Lark Ascending is a moving and unforgettable story of friendship, family, and healing. For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.

MECC Foundation to Host 50th Anniversary Gala

Big Stone Gap — Mountain Empire Community College Foundation will host the MECC 50th Anniversary Gala on Saturday evening, October 22, 2022, at Mountain Empire Community College.

The gala is black tie optional and proceeds from the event will go towards the 50th Anniversary Fund supporting scholarships, infrastructure and unrestricted needs.

The evening will begin with a reception in the Slemp Commons of Phillips-Taylor Hall at 6:30 p.m., followed by a dinner in the Goodloe Center at 6:45 p.m. A short recognition program will follow dinner, and musical entertainment by John McCutcheon will top off the evening.

Tickets for the event are $50 each and can be ordered online at the link above or by contacting MECC Foundation Annual Fund Coordinator Megan Gibson at 276.523.9078 or by email at mgibson@mecc.edu.

Entries Sought for Lonesome Pine Short-Story and Poetry Contests

Big Stone Gap, VA — The MECC Foundation is pleased to announce the 46th annual John Fox, Jr. Literary Festival, a free virtual event featuring Beth Macy, renowned New York Times bestselling author, and executive producer of Hulu’s Dopesick, on Wednesday, March 2 from 10 a.m. to noon.

In coordination with the festival event, the MECC Foundation will host the 35th Annual Lonesome Pine Short Story Contest and the 18^th Annual Lonesome Pine Poetry Contest. The deadline for submitting entries is Wednesday, February 16 at 4:30 p.m. Entry categories include adult, high school (grades 9 through 12), and middle school (grades 5 through 8) categories.  Contest rules are available on the MECC Foundation website at 2022 Contest Rules. Winners of the contest will be announced during the Literary Festival Event. All winners will receive a cash prize.

The virtual festival will feature a discussion with Virginia author Beth Macy. Macy is the author of the critically acclaimed and New York Times-bestselling books, Factory Man, Truevine, and Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America (2018). Macy serves as an Executive Producer and writer on the acclaimed Hulu limited television series Dopesick, which is based on her book. All local middle and high schools are invited to participate in this virtual event at no cost. Students and community members are invited to submit questions for Macy at www.mecc.edu/jffestival22.

Growing out of three decades of reporting from the same Virginia communities, as her prior books did, Dopesick unpacks the most intractable social problems of our time: the opioid crisis, set against a landscape of job loss, corporate greed and stigma, along with the families and first responders who are heroically fighting back. Overdose deaths are now the equivalent of a jetliner crashing in our country every day, and yet the government response to the epidemic remains, in a word, impotent.

Dopesick is, in many ways, the sequel to Macy’s first book, FACTORY MAN. It lays out exactly how the jobless “other America” ended up couch-surfing with the likes of surgeon’s daughters and civic leaders’ kids who fall prey to prostitution, jail, and even death. Tom Hanks describes Dopesick as “a deep — and deeply needed — look into the troubled soul of America.” Stanford addiction medicine specialist and author Dr. Anna Lembke calls it the first book to capture the entirety of the epidemic, “with a fast-paced narrative, colorful and inspiring characters, vivid historical detail, and a profound sense of place.”

A longtime reporter who specializes in outsiders and underdogs, Macy has won more than a dozen national journalism awards, including a Lukas Prize for Factory Man, multiple shortlist and best-book-of-the-year honors for Truevine, and a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard for her newspaper writing.

A frequent speaker, teacher and essayist, Macy has been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Oprah magazine, and Parade. Her approach to storytelling: Report from the ground up, establish trust, be patient, find stories that tap into universal truths. Get out of your ZIP code. To do good journalism, be a human first.

Her book, Raising Lazarus, Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Drug Crisis (August 2022), focuses on solutions to the opioid crisis and the heroic efforts of frontline workers applying harm reduction practices on the streets of America. It also will document the efforts of the Sackler family to avoid responsibility for the crisis they helped create.

For more information on the MECC Foundation, please visit our website at www.meccfoundation.org.

-MECC Foundation-