A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He is also the author of Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, winner of the 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award, and Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, which he adapted for stage, earning him the Paul Green Foundation Playwrights Fellowship Award. His poetry was also dramatized for the 2016 Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV and staged by Message Theater for the 2015 Breeders Cup Festival. A lover of comics, Walker curated “We Wear the Mask: Black Superheroes through the Ages,” an exhibit of his personal collection of action figures, comics, and related memorabilia at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center in 2015; he reprised the exhibit in 2018 at Purdue University and Western Carolina University. Walker recently returned to the world of visual art with a collection of new and early multimedia works, “Black Star Seed: When Mi Cyaan Find Di Words” which was on exhibit at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington.
Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co- founded the Affrilachian Poets, subsequently publishing the much-celebrated eponymous collection. His honors also include a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, the 2008 and 2009 Denny C. Plattner Award for Outstanding Poetry in Appalachian Heritage, the 2013 West Virginia Humanities Council’s Appalachian Heritage Award, as well as fellowships and residences with Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kentucky Arts Council. In 2020 Walker received the Donald Justice Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Spalding University and Centre College, Walker is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and serves as Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. His most recent collection is Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems.
Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collections Crimes Against Birds and Tamp, finalist for the Weatherford Award and recipient of the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry. He is a co-founder and editor at EastOver Press and its literary journal Cutleaf. His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including The Kenyon Review, Iron Horse Literary Reviewand Ecotone. His third collection of poems, Feller, is forthcoming in August 2025 from Mercer University Press.
Emmy-award winner Ben Tanzer's acclaimed work includes the short story collection UPSTATE, the science fiction novel Orphans and the essay collections Lost in Space and Be Cool. Ben is a storySouth and Pushcart nominee, a finalist for the Annual National Indie Excellence and Eric Hoffer Book Awards, a winner of the Devil's Kitchen Literary Festival Nonfiction Prose Award and a Midwest Book Award. He's also received an Honorable Mention at the Chicago Writers Association Book Awards for Traditional Nonfiction and Traditional Fiction and a Bronze Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Ben has written for Hemispheres, Punk Planet, Men’s Health, and The Arrow, AARP’s GenX newsletter. His recent novel The Missing was released in March 2024 by 7.13 Books and his forthcoming book After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema, a mix of memoir and movie criticism, will be released from Ig Publishing in May 2025. He lives in Chicago with his family.
A writer and artist, Anya Liftig has had her creative work exhibited at Tate Modern and MoMA, and she has curated events at The Kitchen, the Center for Performance Research, and the Queens Museum. She lives in Connecticut. Booklist said her memoir, Holler Rat, “gives us a refreshing perspective through her story of growing up with one foot in Appalachian Kentucky and one foot in affluent Connecticut . . . She subtly and masterfully lets the truth of each scenario speak for itself, never letting up and never slowing down, showing us multiple contradictions in one paragraph, allowing us to sit with it long after we are done reading.”
New York Times Bestselling author Gwenda Bond is the author of the romantic comedies Not Your Average Hot Guy, The Date from Hell, and Mr. & Mrs. Witch; the magical art heist novel, The Frame-Up, and historical fantasy romance series featuring witches, gods, and monsters with St. Martin’s called The Wayward Sisters. In addition she penned the first official Stranger Things novel, Suspicious Minds, and several popular YA novels.
She has also written for Publishers Weekly, Locus Magazine, Salon, and the Los Angeles Times, among many others, and is a member of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards Consortium.
Bond serves as a founding board member and current chair of the nonprofit Lexington Writer’s Room. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with a circus of pets: Stella the Cat, HRH; Phoebe the Cat, HRH2; Izzy the Dog-Girl, VIP; Sally the Other-Dog-Girl, ESQ; and Beowoof called Woofie, the Mighty Warrior.
Patrick Wensink is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Lincoln Memorial University and Director of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. He is the bestselling author of several books, including Fake Fruit Factory (Curbside Splendor Publishing, 2015), which was named one of the best novels of the year by NPR. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times, Esquire, Oxford American and many others. He lives in Cumberland Gap, TN with his son.
