I once packed a mason jar of soil

I.

As a University of Kentucky student studying art and special education, Paul Brett Johnson enrolled in a class about writing for children. But it would take another two decades, during which he became a commercially successful artist, before he would launch his second career as an acclaimed author and illustrator of children’s books.

Mary Ann Taylor-Hall studied creative writing at universities in Florida and New York City. But it wasn’t until she settled into a “tar-paper shack” on a rural Kentucky ridge that she says she really became a writer.

Mary Lee Settle, who spent much of her childhood in Pineville, wrote 23 books, including 15 novels. Her novel Blood Tie won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1978. Two years later, she founded the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Fenton Johnson was in sixth grade when he decided he must leave Kentucky when he grew up. He hated the racism he saw around him in New Haven (Nelson County). A few years later, when he realized he was gay, the community’s homophobia confirmed his decision.

Billy C. Clark wrote memoirs, fiction and poetry about his life and river culture along the Kentucky-West Virginia border, where the Big Sandy flows into the Ohio at Catlettsburg. His mother was determined that he would be born on the Kentucky side of those rivers.

Mike Mullins didn’t start the Appalachian Writers Workshop; Kentucky Hall of Fame writer Albert Stewart did that. Mullins didn’t teach at the workshop; Hall of Fame writers Harriette Simpson Arnow, James Still, Gurney Norman, Jim Wayne Miller and many others did that.

George C. Wolfe, one of the most celebrated playwrights and directors in theater and film, is more famous as a director than a writer.

George C. Wolfe is most famous as a three-time Tony Award-winning director of plays and movies, including his new film Rustin, a biographical drama about the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. But the Frankfort native has always been a writer at heart. He is the author of such plays and musicals as Spunk, The Colored […]