Conversations with Kentucky Writers

Linda Elisabeth LaPinta, a Louisville writer and associate professor of English and journalism at Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky, is director of the Kentucky Writers Oral History Project.

With a foreword by Wade Hall Photographs by Susan Lippman Whether they left Kentucky and returned, as Wendell Berry did, or adopted the Commonwealth as home, like James Still, or grew up and left for good, like Barbara Kingsolver, these writers share a common experience: they have all felt Kentucky's influence. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this connection in twenty intimate interviews, presenting some of the state's-and the nation's-best-loved writers at their most insightful and revealing. Included: Wendell Berry, Billy C. Clark, Michael Dorris, Leon Driskell, Sue Grafton, James Baker Hall, Wade Hall, Fenton Johnson, Barbara Kingsolver, George Ella Lyon, Bobbie Ann Mason, Taylor McCafferty, Ed McClanahan, Jim Wayne Miller, Sena Jeter Naslund, Marhsa Norman, Chris Offutt, Lee Pennington, Betty Layman Receveur, and James Still.