KENTUCKY GREAT WRITERS SERIES AUTHORS

Sherry Chandler, is the author of Weaving a New Eden. She has had professional development support and an Al Smith Professional Assistance Award from the Kentucky Arts Council and an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of the Betty Gabehart Award from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, the Legacies Award from the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, the Kudzu poetry prize for 2006, and the Joy Bale Boone Prize for 2006. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies.

Chandler holds a BA from Georgetown College and an MA in English Literature from the University of Kentucky. She lives in rural Bourbon County between Paris and Ruddles Mill with her husband, T. R. Williams, a wood carver. She has twin sons.

Maurice Manning’s fourth book of poetry, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. His first book, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Manning’s other books include A Companion for Owls (2004) and Bucolics (2007). He has held fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and The Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. In 2009 Manning was awarded the Hanes Poetry Prize by The Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2011 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Manning teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and lives in Kentucky.

T. Crunk’s first collection of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, was the 1994 selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He has since published four additional collections of poetry, four books for children, and one collection of short fiction. He lives in Birmingham, AL, where he teaches in a creative writing program in the state of Alabama’s Juvenile Detention Facilities — a program co-sponsored by the Alabama Writers’ Forum and the Alabama Department of Youth Services.

AUTHORS FEATURED IN February’S 2012 KENTUCKY GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Nikky Finney, was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co- founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney’s fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry.

Bobbie Ann Mason was raised on her family’s dairy farm in western Kentucky. She became interested in writing as a child, when she wrote imitations of the mystery series novels she read. She was inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but it wasn’t until college that she discovered other writers, especially the fiction of Hemingway, Salinger, and Fitzgerald.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Kentucky in 1962, her master’s degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966, and her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut in 1972.

Her first short stories were published in The New Yorker, and these were included in her first book of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories. The collection won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and she received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her first novel, In Country, is taught widely in classes and was made into a film starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd.

Both Feather Crowns and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Her memoir, or family history, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She belongs to the Authors Guild, PEN, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

She is former writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.

Ed McClanahan is a native of Brooksville, KY, born in 1932. A graduate of Miami (Ohio) University (AB, 1955) and the University of Kentucky (MA, 1958), he has taught English and creative writing at Oregon State College (now OSU), Stanford University, the University of Montana, the University of Kentucky, and Northern Kentucky University. His books include THE NATURAL MAN (a novel), FAMOUS PEOPLE I HAVE KNOWN (a serio-comic autobiography), A CONGRESS OF WONDERS (three novellas), and MY VITA, IF YOU WILL (a miscellany of previously uncollected fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and commentary). The first two books were published by Farrar Straus & Giroux (1983 and 1985, respectively), the latter two by Counterpoint Press (1996 and 1998). NATURAL MAN has been reprinted by Gnomon Press (Frankfort, KY), and FAMOUS PEOPLE has been reprinted by the University Press of Kentucky; both are still in print, and both are also available from Books on Tape. In 2002, Larkspur Press (Monterey, KY) published McClanahan’s memoir, FONDELLE: or THE WHORE WITH A HEART OF GOLD, in a limited letterpress edition, and in 2008, Counterpoint published his “implied autobiography” O THE CLEAR MOMENT. Forthcoming is I JUST HITCHED IN FROM THE COAST: THE ED McCLANAHAN READER (Counterpoint, Fall 2011).

McClanahan is the editor of SPIT IN THE OCEAN #7: ALL ABOUT KESEY (Viking-Penguin, 2003), a tribute issue of the late Ken Kesey’s self-published magazine, and he contributed an introduction to KESEY’S JAIL JOURNAL (Viking-Penguin, 2003), a volume featuring Kesey’s art work.

The title story of A CONGRESS OF WONDERS was made into a prize-winning short film in 1993, and in 1994 McClanahan was the subject of an hour-long documentary on Kentucky Educational Television. His work has appeared in many magazines, including ESQUIRE, ROLLING STONE, and PLAYBOY, and twice won PLAYBOY’s Best Non-Fiction awards. He has also been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Yaddo Fellowships, and an Al Smith Fellowship. He annually teaches a three-week seminar in creative writing in the University of Kentucky’s Gaines Center for the Humanities. McClanahan’s website is www.edmcclanahan.com.

He lives with his wife Hilda in Lexington, KY.

AUTHORS FEATURED IN OCTOBER’S 2011 KENTUCKY GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Sallie Bingham, published her first novel with Houghton Mifflin in 1961. Since then she has published four collections of short stories, four novels, and a memoir. She was Book Editor for The Courier-Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the founder of The Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Maureen Morehead has published four books of poetry: In a Yellow Room (Sulgrave Press, 1990), Our Brothers’ War (Sulgrave Press, 1993), A Sense of Time Left (Larkspur Press, 2003), and The Melancholy Teacher (Larkspur Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Black Warrior Review, The California Quarterly, The Greensboro Review, The Iowa Review, The Louisville Review, Poet and Critic, Poetry, and other literary journals. She is featured in Conversations with Kentucky Writers II (University of Kentucky Press, 1999) and Kentucky Voices: A Bicentennial Celebration of Kentucky Writing (Kentucky Arts Council, 1992). She won fellowships for her poetry from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She serves as the 2011/2012 Kentucky Poet Laureate.

Kim Edwards was born in Killeen, Texas. She grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and attended Colgate University and The University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in fiction and an MA in linguistics. She is the author of The Secrets of a Fire King, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and many other periodicals. She has received many awards for the short story, including a Pushcart Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1993. Two of her stories were performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on ‘Selected Shorts.’ Kim Edwards received a Whiting Writers’ Award, as well as grants from the Pennsylvania and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, her first novel, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Award pick and became a word-of-mouth best-seller, spending 122 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, 20 of those weeks at #1. Published in more than 38 countries, it was also a best seller in Italy, France, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Holland, and Taiwan. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter won the Kentucky Literary Award and the British Book Award, and was chosen as Book of the Year for 2006 by USA Today. Her new novel, The Lake of Dreams, will be published by Viking in January 2011.

AUTHORS FEATURED IN JUNE’S 2011 KENTUCKY GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Chris Holbrook, a native of Knott County, Kentucky, received the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing for Hell and Ohio: Stories of Southern Appalachia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Holbrook is associate professor of English at Morehead State University. He has published short stories in a variety of literary journals including The American Voice, Appalachian Heritage, Wind, Night Train, Appalachian Journal and The Frost-Proof Review. Author Photo Credit to Rebecca Gayle Howell.

A native of Louisville, Squire Babcock worked as a ballroom dance instructor, farm hand, weigh- man in a cotton gin, hunting guide, pool table repair mechanic, small business owner, carpenter’s apprentice and blues drummer before heeding the call to writing and teaching. He holds B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of a novel, The King of Gaheena, and his creative work has appeared in newsmagazines and journals including The Valley Advocate, Hampshire Life, Old Hickory Review, Colorado Review, Louisville Review, Arts & Letters, and others. He is currently Associate Professor of English at Murray State University, where he has taught literature and writing for 18 years and served as Residential College Head and Director of the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Nickole Brown’s books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems published
by Red Hen Press, and the anthology, Air Fare, that she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press and works as the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books. She lives in Louisville, KY, where she is Lecturer at the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University and teaches at the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State.

AUTHORS FEATURED IN APRIL’S 2011 KENTUCKY GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Affrilachian Poet, Bianca Spriggs, is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees from Transylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Gypsy Poetry Slam featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, and the creator and programmer of the Darkroom Showcase, an interactive interdisciplinary series of performance art featured monthly at the Lexington Art League.

Pushcart Prize winner and National Book Award Finalist, Patricia Smith, calls Bianca’s work, “an aggressive signature that is deftly crafted, insightful and often achingly lyrical.” Having lived most of her life in Kentucky, Bianca’s poems reflect the trials and triumphs of growing up as a woman of color in a border state. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member, Frank X Walker, Bianca Spriggs is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies, New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, America! What’s My Name? and the journals, Caduceus, Alehouse, Torch, and the Appalachian Heritage Magazine.

Silas House is the author of four novels: Clay’s Quilt (2001), A Parchment of Leaves (2003), The Coal Tattoo (2004), Eli the Good (2009), two plays, The Hurting Part (2005) and Long Time Travelling (2009), and Something’s Rising (2009), a creative nonfiction book about social protest co-authored with Jason Howard. House was selected to edit the posthumous manuscript of acclaimed writer James Still, Chinaberry. House’s young adult novel, Same Sun Here, co-written with Neela Vaswani, will be published by Candlewick Books in early 2012.

House serves as the NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. House is a former contributing editor for No Depression magazine, where he has done long features on such artists as Lucinda Williams, Nickel Creek, and many others. He is also one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers, having written the press kit bios for such artists as Kris Kristofferson, Kathy Mattea, Leann Womack, and others. A former writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, he is the creator of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival.

House is a two-time finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year, the Appalachian Writer of the Year, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Chaffin Prize for Literature, the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and many other honors. In 2009 the Silas House Literary Seminar was given at Emory and Henry College. For his environmental activism House received the Helen Lewis Community Service Award in 2008 from the Appalachian Studies Association. In 2010 he was awarded the Intellectual Freedom Award from the Kentucky Council of English Teachers.

House’s work can be found in The New York Times, Newsday, Oxford American, Bayou, The Southeast Review,The Louisville Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Wind, Night Train, and others, as well as in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume 3, New Stories From the South 2004: The Year’s Best, Christmas in the South, A Kentucky Reader, Of Woods and Water, Motif, We All Live Downstream, Missing Mountains, A Kentucky Christmas, Shouts and Whispers, High Horse, The Alumni Grill, Stories From the Blue Moon Café I and II, and many others.

House is the father of two daughters. He divides his time between London and Berea, Kentucky.

Lisa J. Parker is a writer, musician and photographer born and raised in Fauquier County, Virginia. She is the author of the book This Gone Place, published by MotesBooks, and has published in numerous literary magazines, journals and anthologies. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Penn State in 1998 and several writing awards including the Randall Jarrell Prize In Poetry, the National Allen Tate Memorial Prize In Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her photography was exhibited in New York City, where she lived for several years, as part of New York Public Library’s Storylines Project. She currently lives in Virginia where she works in the Defense and Intel sector and continues to work on writing and photography projects. Her work can be seen at www.wheatpark.com.

AUTHORS FEATURED IN FEBRUARY’S 2011 GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Toni Murden McClure is the president of Spalding University, in Louisville, Kentucky.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a Master of Divinity from Harvard University, and her juris doctorate from the University of Louisville’s Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. In 2005, she earned her master of fine arts in writing from Spalding University. Her non-fiction book A Pearl in the Storm was published by Harper-Collins in 2009.
A passionate world adventurer and humanitarian, Ms. McClure is best known as the first woman and first American to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She was also the first woman and first American to travel over land to the geographic South Pole, skiing 750 miles from the ice shelf to the pole.

Sena Jeter Naslund is a native of Birmingham and winner of the Harper Lee Award and recipient of the Southeastern Library Association Award. She is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Louisville; Program Director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing; and 2010 Eminent Scholar at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. She makes her home in Louisville, KY.

Katerina Stoykova is the author of the bilingual poetry book, The Air around the Butterfly (Fakel Express, 2009), and the English language chapbook, The Most (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her poems have been published in the US and Europe, including The Louisville Review, Margie, Adirondack Review and others. Katerina is the founder and leader of poetry and prose groups in Lexington, Kentucky. She serves as Deputy Editor in Chief of the English language edition of the online magazine Public Republic and hosts Accents – a radio show for literature, art and culture on WRFL, 88.1 FM, Lexington. In January 2010 Katerina launched Accents Publishing – an independent press for brilliant voices. Accents has published or announced books by local, national and international authors. Katerina holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

AUTHORS FEATURED in OCTOBER’S 2010 GREAT WRITERS SERIES

Holly Goddard Jones was born and raised in western Kentucky, the setting for her fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, Epoch, and elsewhere, and they’ve been anthologized in two volumes of New Stories from the South (2007 and 2008) and in Best American Mystery Stories 2008. She was honored with a Peter Taylor Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2006 and was the winner in 2007 of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a prize of $25,000 given to only six emerging women fiction writers each year. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, she has taught at Denison University, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, Murray State University, and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives there with her husband, Brandon, and two dogs, Bishop and Martha.

Elizabeth Oakes’ first book, The Farmgirl Poems, won the 2004 Pearl Poetry Prize. Her second, The Luminescence of All Things Emily, is a series of poems about Dickinson and her friends and family. She holds the Ph.D fromVanderbilt University and has published scholarship on early modern drama and contemporary poetry in addition to her own poetry in such journals as The Louisville Review, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Room of One’s Own, Open 24 Hours, Naugatuck River Review, Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, and Harvard Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is the co-founder and co-editor, with Jane Olmsted, of the Kentucky Feminist Writers Series, which was awarded the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Sallie Bingham Feminist Action Award in 2004. The series includes Writing Who We Are: Poems by Kentucky Feminists (1999), Telling Stories: Fiction by Kentucky Feminists (2001), and I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists (2004). Retired in 2009 from teaching Shakespeare and American women poets at Western Kentucky University, she lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Sedona, Arizona. Mercy in the New World, a series of poems in the voice of an American colonial woman, will be published by Wind in the spring of 2011. She is currently working on a series of poems about the medieval carvings in Glastonbury, England, and a volume of prose meditations on lines from Shakespeare.

Alex Taylor lives in Rosine, Kentucky. He has worked as a day laborer on tobacco farms, as a car detailer at a used automotive lot, as a sorghum peddler, at various fast food chains, as a tender of suburban lawns, and at a cigarette lighter factory. He holds an MFA from The University of Mississippi and now teaches at Western Kentucky University. His work has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, American Short Fiction, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.