Sign up to win prizes and for exclusive updates about this year’s festival
April 24-26, 2026
Joy Sheffield Harris was born in Tripoli, Libya, on Wheelus Field Air Base then moved to Panama City, Florida just in time to attend Humpty Dumpty Kindergarten and later Florida State University. As a home economics and history teacher and later a marketing specialist for the Florida Department of Natural Resources and the Florida Poultry […]
Referred to by Billboard Magazine as “One of Music Row’s greatest veteran tunesmiths,” Jerry Salley has had an incredibly successful, multi-award winning songwriting career. Nominated in 2019 for the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame & for a Grammy for producing the multi-artist project GonnaSing, Gonna’ Shout, Salley is the 2019 & 2018 IBMA (International Bluegrass […]
Musician, songwriter, author and award winning filmmaker Jennifer Msumba took the top prize in the 2020 Easterseals Disability challenge with her film The Fish Don’t Care When It Rains. Her ever- increasing tribe of 32k followers enjoy a steady diet of her vlogs and interviews on her YouTube channel, simply titled Jennifer Msumba. Her debut […]
Jennifer Daniels is an award-winning singer/songwriter and teaching artist who has released nine music albums, a picture book, and has just welcomed her first novel into the world! As an assistant to Eric Litwin (author of Pete the Cat, I Love My White Shoes), Jennifer’s family shows are full of interactive songs, stories, and movement […]
Heather Maloney has toured nationally as a headliner as well as in support of acts like Lake Street Dive, Shakey Graves, Gary Clark Jr., Colin Hay, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and many more. The New York Times called her music “utterly gorgeous, visceral” and SPIN Magazine described her as “stunning, breathy, and starkly memorable”. Her new […]
Hank is a writer, editor and musician living in Brooklyn, New York. For the past 20 years, he has covered jazz, metal and various other styles for publications including Rolling Stone (where he’s currently on staff as a senior editor), The New York Times, Pitchfork, AllMusic.com and Time Out New York. In 2011, he published […]
Besides his life as a bass player, Greg Cohen has also worked as an arranger, producer, musical director and composer for the theater, film, television and recording studios. The recordings he has been a part of have received various critical acclaim -including the Pulitzer Prize (Ornette Coleman), gold records and many album of the year […]
With music ranging from down-home-blues and soul all the way to funk and rock-n-roll, the Frank Jones Band puts on a great musical experience packed with talented musicians and a variety of tunes. The group has southern soul vocalist and guitar player Frank Jones leading the show with influences ranging from Albert Collins, B.B. King, […]
Born in 1954, Donald Ray Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, Ohio. After dropping out of high school, he worked at a meat processing plant and a shoe factory before hiring on at a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he spent the next thirty-two years. He is the author of three books of fiction: Knockemstiff, […]
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of […]