Speakers and Workshops
Updates to this page are ongoing, so check back this summer for more!
Andrew Peterson
Fiction Keynote
Andrew Peterson is a singer-songwriter, author, and founder of the Rabbit Room. Andrew has released more than ten records over the past twenty years, earning him a reputation for songs that connect with his listeners in ways equally powerful, poetic, and intimate. As an author, Andrew’s books include the four volumes of the award-winning Wingfeather Saga, which have sold more than a million copies, along with his creative memoirs, Adorning the Dark, and The God of the Garden. He’s also an executive producer of the Wingfeather Saga Animated Series, which is currently in production on its third season with Angel Studios. In 2008 Andrew founded the Rabbit Room, a nonprofit organization based in Nashville, Tennessee that nourishes Christ-centered communities by cultivating and curating stories, art, and music.
James Matthew Wilson
Poetry Featured Presenter
James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas and author of sixteen books. The Strangeness of the Good (2020), won the poetry book of the year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award. He also serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age magazine. Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship. Wilson joined the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, in 2021, when he co-founded the Master of Fine Arts program.
Karen Swallow Prior
Creative Nonfiction Featured Presenter
Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is the 2025-26 Karlson Scholar at Bethel Seminary. She is a reader, writer, and speaker; she is the author of You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful (Brazos 2025); The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos 2023); On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018); Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson 2014); and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press 2012). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. She is a contributing writer at The Dispatch and has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other places. She hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus. She is a research fellow at Comment and a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens, and lots of books.
Fiction Workshop
Katy Carl
Katy Carl returns again this year to lead our fiction workshop. Katy is editor at Luminor Books and writer in residence at the University of St. Thomas—Houston, where she earned her MFA in creative writing. Author of As Earth Without Water, Fragile Objects, Christopher Beha: Novelist in a Postsecular World, and Praying the Great O Antiphons, she is editor emeritus of Dappled Things magazine, on whose editorial board she has served since 2007, and a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. Her writing has appeared in Ekstasis, Evangelization & Culture, Public Discourse, Genealogies of Modernity, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, Windhover, Solum Literary Journal, Vita Poetica, Belle Ombre, Across the Margin, Exposition Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Sostenuto, and Church Life Journal, among others.
Page last updated April 28, 2026