The Kentucky Connection

Kentucky, ever the land of paradox, is not generally celebrated for intellectual achievement. Yet for its population, the state seems to have turned out more than its share of fine writers. And many of those writers have written about Kentucky, creating a rich and varied home-grown literature. In these pages, two of the writers featured in Living by Words and a man who is helping to catalog and preserve the state’s literary heritage offer their perspectives on that heritage:

• Literary Kentucky—an essay by Gurney Norman on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the University of Kentucky Creative Writing Program
  


• How Come There Are So Many Good Writers Working Now in Kentucky?—an article by James Baker Hall about the contemporary Kentucky literary scene
  


• Curating Kentucky—an interview with James Birchfield of the University of Kentucky library system

And Elsewhere Online ...

Some other resources for exploring Kentucky writers and writing:

• Our own bookclub@ket is a series of televised discussions of books by Kentuckians and/or about Kentucky. The web site offers links and a variety of other information for every featured book and author.
  


• KYLIT, from Eastern Kentucky University, includes biographies and more links.
  


• Coal Black Voices is a Kentucky Muse presentation of the 2001 documentary about the Affrilachian Poets, a Kentucky-based group of African-American poets.