The Carnegie Center Author Academy is designed to support students as they prepare their work for publication. Featured below are works published by Author Academy students and mentors both past and current.
Cassie Brown’s short story, class of 2021 “Thawing” will appear in Mid/South Anthology, a publication of Belle Point Press in 2022.
Jennifer Caldwell, class of 2017-18, received first prize in the Carnegie Center’s 2018 Flash Fiction Writing Contest with her piece “Graveyard Meetin’.” She also received an honorable mention in the same contest for the piece “The Storm.”
James B. Goode, Carnegie Center Author Academy mentor, is widely published. Most recently, his short story “Switchback” and poem “What Was in the Well” were published in Edison State’s 2019 literary and photography journal Excursions.
Janet Steele Holloway, class of 2015-16, published her second memoir, Leaving: Sometimes You Have to Leave, in July 2017. Leaving tells of the author’s leaving the coal camps of southwest West Virginia and heading for New York City. Her life in NYC, Detroit, and finally, Lexington, KY, includes working in East Harlem on the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated; being a classroom teacher in Detroit and being faced with telling her class that President Kennedy had been killed; landing in Lexington in 1990 to lead the KY Small Business Development Center network, then founding Women Leading Kentucky.
Kay Collier McCloughlin, class of 2016-2017, published her first book, Talking Together: Getting Beyond Polarization Through Civil Dialogue, in 2017. Since the release of the book, Kay has done numerous book signings, presentations, and Talking Together Seminars in Kentucky, Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, Minnesota and Colorado. Realizing the continuing resistance to engaging with people of differing perspectives, Kay observed the need for a non-threatening vehicle to introduce people to concepts that make civil dialogue possible.
In 2018, Kay wrote and staged a musical production titled “The Love Umbrella and Rubber Band Me,” featuring a nine-member cast of androgynous archetypes. Kay’s second book, Hope in the Darkness: Essays is forthcoming.
Audrey Rooney, class of 2015-16, marked the debut of her poetry book Fountains for Orpheus (Accents Publishing) with a reading at the Carnegie Center in August 2016. She was mentored by Katerina Stoykova.
For the 2017 Poetry Gauntlet (Christopher McCurry presiding) she met the workshop’s challenge to finish 100 poems. Three are fruits of “Writing Poems About Art,” a ten-week class at the Carnegie Center offered by Jeff Worley and Jeff’s brother and art historian Michael Worley. Image and prosody made acquaintance, eyes, and ears opened wide, and we did laugh. Two new manuscripts, working titles Boundary Waters and Four Score, hope to see daylight in 2018.
Cynthia Shelby published her first book Who Do You Say That I Am?: A Woman’s Journey to Growing Closer to God in a Year, in December of 2020.
