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, […]
Walter Tevis
Crime writer and literary critic James Sallis wrote in the Boston Globethat Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earthwas “among the finest science fiction novels.” He labeled it as a Christian […]
Jim Wayne Miller
One of Jim Wayne Miller’s tenets as a poet was to provide the reader with an environment of deep discovery. He once said that he was often amused when a […]
Annie Fellows Johnston
Annie Fellows Johnston became famous in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies as a prolific author of books for children. She wrote dozens of books and contributed short stories to […]
bell hooks
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her uncapitalized pen name, bell hooks, is a prolific writer and teacher who has spent her life developing constructs where scholars, activists and readers […]
