The Blount County Public Library is marking five years of its literary festival with a morning dedicated to regional writers, book signings, and a keynote address from an award-winning Cherokee novelist. The fifth Anna Belle Smith Literary Festival runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 24 inside the library, bringing together authors and readers for a few hours of talks, discussions, and book sales.
The free annual event takes its name from the library's founding mother, Anna Belle Smith, according to The Daily Times. This year's festival opens with a keynote from Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, the award-winning author of “Even as We Breathe,” whose talk is set to cover writing contemporary fiction, BIPOC representation, Native American and Indigenous concerns, and class and economic inequality. Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary, and her session will include time for audience questions along with a book signing.
A Keynote With a Deep Literary Résumé
Clapsaddle's writing has appeared in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, South Writ Large, Travel + Leisure, and The Atlantic, per the same report. She has received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium, and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her keynote sets the tone for a festival that organizer Sheri McCarter, the library's writer-in-residence, has steered into its fifth year, a role citizen-times.com confirmed ahead of last year's event.
After the keynote, regional authors will set up in the library's main gallery, offering visitors a chance to chat about their work, browse books for sale, and get titles signed. The Daily Times describes those authors as offering a diverse range of works for readers browsing the gallery tables. Past festivals have drawn writers including John McManus, Frank X Walker, and Karen Spears Zacharias, giving a sense of the caliber of authors the event has attracted in prior years.
How the Festival Has Grown Since Last Year
Programming has not stayed static year to year. The festival adapts every year to the needs of the community and participants, the outlet notes, and last year's edition folded in talks on poetry, art, co-authoring, and stories of conservation. The fourth Anna Belle Smith Literary Festival was held on Oct. 25, 2025, also at the Blount County Public Library, where authors signed books and spoke directly with readers.
Attendance figures for last year's festival varied depending on the source: The Daily Times reported about 60 authors present at the 2025 event, while a preview from citizen-times.com had anticipated more than 50 regional authors representing a wide variety of genres. That earlier preview also noted that several published authors led workshops focused on the craft of writing, and that both the festival and a related evening panel were free with no registration required.
Evening Event Extends the Celebration
This year's festival schedule includes an evening follow-up hosted by the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont on Saturday evening, after the daytime festival wraps up. That event features authors Ron Rash, Crystal Wilkinson, Linda Parsons, and Kelli Jo Ford, who are set to take part in a discussion panel followed by a book signing. It mirrors a similar pairing from the previous year, when the institute's Tremont Writers Conference followed the literary festival with a panel on rural writing.
With the keynote, author tables, and the evening panel all built around the same Oct. 24 weekend, the festival's fifth year keeps the format that has defined it since it began: a free, community-rooted gathering honoring Anna Belle Smith's legacy at the Blount County Public Library.
