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 an ongoing series of televised discussions of books by Kentuckians and/or about Kentucky. One new book is featured each month, and past programs air weekly. The web site offers links and a variety of other information for every featured book and author.
  


• Famous Kentuckians: Authors and Journalists has capsule descriptions and some photos of Kentucky writers.
  


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


• The American Literary Map, part of the teacher’s site accompanying Masterpiece Theatre’s American Collection, invites teachers and students to help build an online bibliography by researching the lives and works of their local writers. The Kentucky page includes an A-Z list of Kentucky writers.
  


• Coal Black Voices is a documentary about the Affrilachian Poets, a Kentucky-based group of African-American poets. The web site includes poems and video clips.