Crystal Wilkinson’s latest book, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, explores the relationship between food and family

I might as well tell you about it.

Woo-hoo! I did it. I did it. I really, really did it. At age 69, I got my first (and most likely only) tattoo.

Two weeks—join the Confederate forces or be hanged as a traitor. Two weeks. Not much time, but it was all he was going to get. He shivered, chilled by more than the cold cutting through his woolen breeches. The red mare snorted. Andrew Fondren shifted carefully in his saddle. He watched as puffs of white […]

My grandmother stole things. Inside her one-car garage, peeling yellow paint flecked across a trove of objects stacked in forgotten piles: leather-covered bank ledgers; a black-handled umbrella in a posh tan check; a plastic palm tree sitting amongst gray pebbles in a brass-banded, wooden pot. Gran signed checks with a Cross pen that had belonged […]

In time these waters headed westward,

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.