Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie attracted national attention not only as a songwriter and performer, but for her work popularizing traditional Appalachian ballads, many of which had their roots in the British Isles […]
Alice Hegan Rice
Alice Hegan Rice published 20 books between 1901 and 1942, but she is best known for her first: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, a best-selling novel inspired by her work […]
Harlan Hubbard
Harlan Hubbard’s realization that industrialism and consumerism posed a threat to the environment and human survival changed his life forever. So did his marriage to Anna Eikenhout in 1943. “They […]
James Lane Allen
James Lane Allen, one of Kentucky’s first best-selling novelists, was widely read in the United States and Great Britain in the late 19thand early 20thcenturies. His writing is considered part […]
Bobbie Ann Mason
Bobbie Ann Mason’s literary landscape is the hopes, dreams, and challenges of working-class people in her native Jackson Purchase region of western Kentucky. Many of her stories place characters at […]
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr.
Joseph Seamon Cotter’s life spanned two centuries of monumental change for African Americans — the end of slavery in the 19th century and the long battle for equality in the 20thcentury. […]
Barbara Kingsolver
Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe characterized Barbara Kingsolver as the “Woody Guthrie of contemporary American fiction,” primarily because social activism is at the core of most of her published work. What […]
Gayl Jones
In a 1982 interview with Charles Rowell, Gayl Jones said that, like most people, she felt “connections to home territory — connections that go into one’s ideas of language, personality, landscape.” […]
Hunter S. Thompson
Scanlan’s Monthly was one of those short-lived magazines nobody would remember, except for one 1970 article: “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” by Hunter S. Thompson. The Louisville-born journalist had […]
Effie Waller Smith
As an African American woman in Appalachian Kentucky in the early 1900s, Efflie Waller Smith was unlikely to become a published poet. She was born to former slaves Frank Waller, […]
