Gurney Norman
Fiction writer, essayist, literary critic, editor, screenwriter, teacher, and mentor, Gurney Norman is widely recognized as an authority on the literary and cultural history of Appalachia. Most of his career […]
Hollis Summers
Hollis Spurgeon Summers Jr. wrote many novels, collections of poetry, and short stories during an award-winning career teaching English at Georgetown College, the University of Kentucky and Ohio University. Summers […]
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton spent 27 years in Nelson County, Kentucky as a Trappist Monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani. He authored more than 70 books covering a wide range of genres including […]
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of 44 plays whose work reimagined the landscape and people of the American West. He became one of the best-known playwrights of his […]
Etheridge Knight
Etheridge Knight born into a poor family of seven children. Knight spent most of his adolescent years working in pool halls, bars, and juke joints where he developed a drug […]
Lucy Furman
Lucy Salome Furman attracted national attention with her popular short stories and novels about small-town and rural life in both eastern and western Kentucky around the turn of the last […]
James Baker Hall
James Baker Hall was a versatile talent, excelling as a poet, novelist, short story writer, and photographer. He also was a consummate teacher for more than 30 years (1973-2003) in the […]
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks was one of 20thcentury America’s most respected literary critics and influential literature professors. With Robert Penn Warren, his classmate and longtime colleague, Brooks wrote the classic college textbooks Understanding […]
Janice Holt Giles
Janice Holt Giles was born in Arkansas, the second of four children of educators John Albert Holt and Lucy Elizabeth McGraw Holt. She didn’t begin her first novel until 1946, […]
Thomas D. Clark
Thomas Dionysius Clark was perhaps Kentucky’s best-known historian. He was as a professor, preservationist, lecturer, dynamic public speaker, researcher, and a skilled writer and advocate for improving life in Kentucky. Clark […]
