The Winner....
The winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award is Kathleen Driskell for Next Door to the Dead.
The winner of the Judy Gaines Young Student Writing Award is Laura Daley .
Please join us for the awards ceremony on March 21, 2018 at 5 pm in Cowgill 102 on Transy's Campus to congratulate our winners and hear readings from their works.
The Authors
Darnell Arnoult, Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln Memorial University, received her MFA from the University of Memphis and MA from North Carolina State University. She is the author of the novel Sufficient Grace and the poetry collections What Travels With Us, recipient of the 2005 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature and named 2006 SIBA Poetry Book of the Year, and Galaxie Wagon, for which she received the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Arnoult received the Mary Frances Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters and was named 2007 Tennessee Writer of the Year. She is executive editor of drafthorse: a literary journal of work and no work and directs the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival and co-directs the Appalachian Young Writers Workshop at LMU. She lives in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee with her husband, metal artist William Brock.
Kathleen Driskell is an award-winning poet and teacher. Her newest poetry collection is Blue Etiquette: Poems, released by Red Hen Press in September 2016. In 2015, Next Door to the Dead, a Kentucky Voices Selection, was published by The University Press of Kentucky). Her full-length poetry collection Seed Across Snow was listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation.
Her poems have appeared in many nationally known literary journals including the Southern Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and Rattle and are featured online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in American Life in Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in What Comes Down to Us: 20 Contemporary Kentucky Poets and The Kentucky Anthology.
Kathleen is professor of Creative Writing at Spalding University, and Program Director of the low-residency MFA in Writing Program. An Al Smith Fellow of the Kentucky Arts Council, Kathleen lives with her family in an old country church built before the Civil War.
Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel, Trampoline. His fiction has appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Still, and Southern Cultures. His second novel, Weedeater, will be published by Ohio University Press in 2018. Gipe is the Appalachian Program Director at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College in Harlan County, Kentucky. In that role, he teaches English and Appalachian Studies and produces the Higher Ground series of community performances. Higher Ground engages community members in a story gathering and songwriting process that results in original musical dramas addressing issues and celebrating the strengths of Harlan County and the surrounding area. Gipe is the former director of Educational Services at Appalshop, a media arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. He has coordinated artist residencies, professional development workshops in the arts, and classroom-based research projects in the integration of the arts in the classroom. Gipe grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Wake Forest University and a master’s degree in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Mark Powell is author of five novels, most recently Small Treasons from Gallery/Simon & Schuster, a 2017 SIBA Okra Pick, a Southern Living "Year's Best," and a New York Post "Must Read." Powell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and in 2014 was a Fulbright Fellow to Slovakia. In 2009 he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He holds degrees from Yale Divinity School, the University of South Carolina, and the Citadel. He lives in the mountains of North Carolina where he teaches at Appalachian State University.
Mary Ann Taylor-Hall has published two novels, Come and Go, Molly Snow and At The Breakers, and a collection of stories, How She Knows What She Knows About Yo-Yos. Her short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, and other literary quarterlies, and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories.She has published three collections of poetry, Dividing Ridge, Joy Dogs, and Out of Nowhere, New and Selected Poems. She has been the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council.
She grew up in Central Florida, attended Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and graduated from the University of Florida. After receiving her M. A. degree from Columbia University, she spent two migratory decades before settling on a farm in Harrison County, Kentucky, where she still lives.
The Judge
Jason Howard is the author of A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music and co-author of Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal. His essays, features and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Oxford American, Salon, The Nation, Sojourners, Utne Reader and on NPR and C-SPAN's Book TV. He serves as editor of Appalachian Heritage, a literary quarterly based at Berea College, where he also teaches.
The nominated books...
Galaxie Wagon by Call Number: PS3601.R586 A6 2016Publication Date: 2016-02-22In Galaxie Wagon, Darnell Arnoult navigates the territory of middle age to find humor, heartbreak, and wisdom in a phase of life where the body begins to betray itself, yet romance is still possible and childhood dreams are still attainable. Deceptively simple yet carefully crafted, these engaging poems teach us how memory and attention point us toward our future and grapple with the great paradox: the undeniable knowledge of the finite and an indefatigable belief in the infinite.
Next Door to the Dead by Call Number: PS3604.R56583 A6 2015Publication Date: 2015-06-29"When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet -- whose last book,Seed across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation -- lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life. Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These "neighbors," with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones. Next Door to the Deadtranscends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell's poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us."
Trampoline by Call Number: PS3607.I4688 T83 2015Publication Date: 2015-03-15"Trampoline, a debut novel by Robert Gipe, is set in the coalfields of Kentucky. Its narrator is Dawn Jewell, a teenager who recounts the turbulent time when her grandmother Cora led her into a fight to stop a mountaintop removal coal mine. Dawn's father, Delbert, is dead, killed in the mines, leaving her mother, Tricia, a grieving drunk. Trampoline follows Dawn as she decides whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or ruled by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life. Trampoline includes more than two hundred drawings that punctuate the narrative in a unique, dramatic, and moving way and amplify Dawn's telling of her story"-- Provided by publisher
Small Treasons by Call Number: PS3616.O88 S63 2017Publication Date: 2017-06-06"Tess Maynard's life is coming apart. At home with her three young children in her husband's small north Georgia hometown, she is steadily becoming obsessed with an American journalist captured in Syria and being held by ISIS, sensing an eerie resonance between his captivity and her own. Meanwhile, the life of her husband is also beginning to unravel. John Maynard is a psychologist working as a college counselor. But in a former life-a life that becomes his obsession-he worked as a government contractor at a CIA black site in Eastern Europe where suspected terrorists, and one innocent civilian, were tortured. Now the Justice Department is threatening an investigation, but not if John will cooperate in an ongoing operation: a professor at the college where he works is rumored to be involved with an organization masking a militant group. As John and Tess work to salvage their life together a young man in Atlanta is slowly becoming radicalized-groomed by the professor John is meant to report on-to fight not in Syria but at home in the US. Eventually all three lives intersect, with devastating consequences"
Out of Nowhere by Call Number: PS3570.A983 A6 2017Publication Date: 2017-12-08"Out of Nowhere is the first comprehensive collection of poetry by Kentucky writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, presenting sixty-six new poems and work from two previous letterpress collections. Selected and arranged by the author, the poems in Out of Nowhere unfold as a luminous narrative of the poet's life, moving through seasons of experience—from the first stirrings of childhood consciousness to present-day meditations on loss and grief—with candor, clarity, and startling tenderness. She opens to the reader the intimate landscape of her life in rural Kentucky, which she connects directly to the immensities and astonishing mysteries of the universe that come smashing through even our most ordinary days."
