Creative Writing - All Levels

Ned Dougherty is an award-winning playwright and educator with deep roots in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and West Virginia. His tall tales about regular people and black comedies about rural anxieties have landed at festivals across the country and abroad in Ireland, with recent Appalachian plays gaining recognition at theatres across the region. He was a 2024 semifinalist for the O'Neill National Playwriting Festival and was selected as a 2025 Creative Entrepreneur Fellow with the WV Creative Network. Through his Appalachian Ode Project, Ned facilitates free community writing workshops across the region to help others articulate their shared identities and reclaim pride-in-place through the power of collaborative poetry. He teaches students navigating the juvenile justice system in Pocahontas County, WV where he lives with his family.

Creative Writing Master

Doug Van Gundy is a nationally-known Appalachian musician who has performed and taught throughout the United States and in Canada and Great Britain. Doug learned music in his family, his hometown of Elkins, West Virginia, and from master musicians Mose Coffman (1905 – 1995) and Dwight Diller (1946 – 2023). In 2017, Doug was recognized as a Master Artist by the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. For the past 28 years he has been playing fiddle, guitar, mandolin, harmonica and banjo with Paul Gartner as the old-time string duo, Born Old. Doug also directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of journals, including The Guardian, Poets & Writers, Poetry, The Oxford American, and Guernica. He is co-editor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia (WVU Press) and the author of a book of poems, A Life above Water (Red Hen Press). His second poetry collection is forthcoming.