Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle: Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference Author Readings

Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference faculty member Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle will give a public reading of her work at the Porter Center on the Brevard College campus on Friday, May 16, at 7:30 pm. 

Sponsored by the Transylvania County Library Foundation and Brevard College, The Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference (LGRWC) offers a unique creative experience for writers, exploring the theme “A Sense of Place.” Conference participants will work closely with award-winning writers Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Terrance Hayes, and Elizabeth Rush. In addition, conference faculty will present public readings of their work on Friday, May 16 at Brevard College’s Porter Center and Saturday, May 17 at the Transylvania County Library.  Both events are free to attend and open to the community. Highland Books will be on-site with books for sale, and the authors will be available to sign copies after their presentations. Workshop attendees were selected based on applications submitted last fall; applications for May 2026 workshops will open in September 2025.

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, resides in Qualla, NC, with her husband, Evan, and sons Ross and Charlie. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe, was released by the University Press of Kentucky in 2020, a finalist for the Weatherford Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. In 2021, it received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water, is the winner of the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014).

Clapsaddle’s work has appeared in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Salvation South, South Writ Large, Our State Magazine, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure Magazine, and The Atlantic. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette returned to teaching at Swain County High School for over a dozen years. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and is the President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network. Clapsaddle established Bird Words, LLC in 2022 and works as an independent contractor and consultant. In 2023, in partnership with Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Clapsaddle launched Confluence: An Indigenous Writers’ Workshop Series that seeks to bring indigenous writers to the Qualla Boundary (Cherokee, NC) to work with aspiring writers.