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Excalibur and The Holy Grail
Chairperson: Jeannette Harris holds a high honors degree in cognitive psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. A professional accounting systems manager, programmer/analyst, technical documentarian and business owner, her writing in articles, short stories and poetry has been widely published on the internet and to a lesser extent in hardcopy. She also has a professional background in musical dimensions, law, small business creation and direction, collaborative management and system development, computer programming and run-time installation, advertising, digital design, graphic arts, and behavioral clinic therapies. A lifelong activist Democrat, she served briefly as the first woman Co-Chair of the Green Party of Tennessee, 2001-2003, by appointment. Raised in the suburbs of Boston Massachusetts and along the coast of Maine, she has lived and worked cross-country and in the Appalachian regions of Virginia and Tennessee for thirty years, has been a volunteer for Tennessee's Jonesborough/Washington County Museum tour of homes and cultural entertainments, Pangaea World Music Festival, Washington County Envionmental Action Group, Friends of the Nolichuckey, and International Storytelling Center, Washington County TN's Gore/Lieberman and Boone NC's Obama/Biden Presidential campaigns, and is currently a volunteering member for Friends of the Washington County Library and the NE Tennessee/SW Virginia Heritage Alliance, and Jonesborough Fine Arts, Inc. (a regional cooperative) for which she serves as Foundation Publicity Chairperson.
President: Leah Daily, a native of East Tennessee, works full-time in a health-related field, part-time in sales marketing, and performs professionally as an actress in Northern Virginia, where she lives with her husband and son. She has starred in many plays over the span of her career and has a double-degree from East Tennessee State University, Johnson City TN, in Drama and Criminal Justice.In addition to co-parenting, she has formed a fledgling independent metro-area theatre (Curtains Up!) performing group of which she is the managing director. She traces her ancestry back to such original American settlers of the continent as early Cherokee and citizens of the State of Franklin and later ancestors, descendants themselves of Revolutionary War era European veterans, who were amongst the 80 to 100 men a day, eventually comprising the majority of Tennessee's war casualties, who left their homes, wives and children, and livelihoods in eastern Tennessee to join Union forces in Kentucky to fight again for their country against the encroaching Confederacy.
Her grandmother -- along with her grandather, a well-known Appalachian journeyman preacher -- was honored in the White House by President Ronald Reagan as a founder of and activist for MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), having lost her two youngest adult children to that now-criminal behavior. Leah and her nuclear family are actively affiliated with Leesburg Community Church.Vice President: Carolyn Moore, originally from South Carolina, graduated from that state's university at age 19 with a double major in Psychology and Sociology. A resident of Jonesborough Tennessee, and occasionally Boone, North Carolina, for many years, she has pursued her interest in civics and criminal justice by serving for many years on the local Historical Preservation Zoning Board, national and state Executive Committees of the Democratic Party, and as a church elder for Jonesborough Presbyterian Church. Travel throughout Europe, Britain and the Middle East with her late husband, law professor and department chairperson for NC's Appalachian State University, allowed exploration of worldwide religions and art forms. She has also been an active and lifelong supporter of The Southern Poverty Law Center. Her writing has been published in regional hardcopy and within ACR. 
Board Member: Kathryn Miles Fenton is a native and long-time resident homeowner of Los Angeles, California, whose lifelong career as a highly-regarded union makeup artist spans years of popular and well-known Hollywood film and television presentations. She retains a small, beloved retreat also on the Hawaian island of Kauai. During the vibrant musical heyday of the early 1970s, Kathy served as Road Manager for Emmy Lou Harris and Gram Parsons performance touring through Tennessee and nearby Mountain Empire environs.
Favorite quotations: Board Member: Gwendoline Fortune is a retired African-American D.Ed., professor of Social Science and History, and a writer, which is her first love. She has written columns for North Carolina and Illinois independent newspapers and has been guest columnist at others, such as The Raleigh News and Observer. She has completed two marketed novels, Growing Up Nigger-Rich and Family Lines, and a third awaiting publication in addition to a play, short stories and poetry. Her distributed anthology of verse is titled Dancing as Fast as We Can and Inner Scan. Previously a member of the Appalachian Writers Association, Friday Noon Poets, Off-Campus Writers Workshop, the North Carolina Writers Network, and a member of the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society, she has retired to Florida where she has been working on politically-relevent pod-casts. Board Member: Frances Lamberts holds a PhD in Psychology and is a retired director of Greeneville Tennessee's Greene Valley Developmental Center, a facility for the handicapped, who maintains extensive organic gardens and domestic animals on a one-acre homestead in Jonesborough TN. Her devotion to environmental causes has involved her in many regional entities and actions to preserve habitat, including creation and monthly organization of the Washington County Environmental Action Group from 1996 through 2005. Originally from Germany, she has served as the Natural Resources Chairperson for the local League of Women Voters for many years. She has also written an environmental column published weekly in the Jonesborough Herald and Tribune over the past few years in addition to being the subject of regional interviews and explorations into functionally healthy organic lifestyles. Additionally, Frances developed Jonesborough's delightful Buttefly Garden and its state-certified Arboretum(Ardinna Woods)[ see photos] and for many years has hosted in her home ETSU foreign exchange students from Deutscheland. Board Member: Chris Mysinger is licensed in therapeutic massage techniques, accredited in nutritional herbalism, and has owned her own business for ten years near her original East Tennessee home. Her interests and education are in, particularly, self-help and holistic therapies.
Board Member: Caroline Freedom Ross is a published author of three non-fiction books, one co-written with her husband, musician/sports writer Alan Ross. She is a former syndicated columnist of “Through Rose-Colored Glasses,” a published poet, and former Executive Director of the Nashville Advertising Federation, a non-profit trade organization. She studied photography at Nashville State College, and later did a series of photographs on Golden Acre, a property formerly on the historic register. In 2003, she moved to Bisbee, Arizona, a community that is widely recognized as a center for the arts. She was a docent at the Central School Project, an arts and ecology center, and a volunteer at the Bisbee Mining Museum. She attended Cochise College’s Southwest Studies Center, located on the Mexican border, where she double-majored in art and anthropology. Today she lives outside Nashville Tennessee and manages her husband’s office -- in addition to her own organic gardening, teaching, studying, authorships and creative networking/management helpful to being ACR Literary Editor. Her writing within this site through 2003 appears under her penname, karol cooper. She is also devotedly caring mother to three adult kin-sons, two grown step-sons and one step-daughter.Caroline's husband is the beautifully-accomplished Scottish songwriter/bard(guitar, bagpipes) Alan Ross Board Member: Vera Tracy, a returned native of Tennessee, has lived and traveled the country extensively before settling two decades ago in Jonesborough. She is an award-winning artist with work in private and corporate collections throughout the United States. She provides private tutoring and commission work, and teaches regular art classes. Specializing in watercolor portraits and mixed media, she studied Fine Art at the University of Memphis, and with regionally known artist Urban Bird and nationally known artists Judi Betts, Jan Kunz, and Alex Powers. Selected for display over the years in various regional shows, her sculpture, paintings and drawing reflect the struggles of life in a love of form and startling design.
"... There is a memory within us - a way to find our people. Whether we were artists, witches, writers, healers, poets or listeners. No matter what, the mountains bring us home. Right now I'm studying the tie between the Tibetans and their mountains, and how the Navajo and their mountains both have the same rituals and spiritual ceremonies. The Mountain calls to us all. As Jesus said, 'I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done.' Buddha says it, Mohammad says it, and so do the First Peoples of all the Nations... Mountains are magical. And in that magic, secrets are kept so that the world can stay in balance. And the trees on mountains...well...they are just homes for all that is Divine!"
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Email admin@acountryrag.org.
Original material © Jeannette Harris and Country Rag, Inc., 2008, 2011. All rights reserved.
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Board Member: Kim Upton is the