Frank X Walker - co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, widely published writer, founder of a journal of Affrilachian culture, and recipient of numerous writing and teaching awards - will join the faculty of the University of Kentucky in January 2010. Walker has accepted a position in the UK College of Arts and Sciences Department of English, where he will teach in the Creative Writing Program as an associate professor. As he returns to his alma mater, Walker will also bring with him Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, which he founded in 2007.

“The college is thrilled Frank will be joining the English department and bringing with him expertise in Affrilachia,” said

Katherine Osborne knew UK’s Department of English was the right graduate program for her the moment she met then-DGS Ellen Rosenman during a campus tour.

"She talked about her work, but she was more interested in me,” said Osborne, a Frankfort, Ky., native and graduate of Hanover College in Indiana. “I could tell she was interested in graduate students. That was evident from the get-go. She just completely turned me on to the program.”

Now in her fifth year at UK, Osborne’s interest in 19th-century British literature has flourished under Rosenman’s mentoring. Osborne credits two of Rosenman’s courses—one on George Eliot and the other on material objects in the Victorian age—as the impetus for development of her own dissertation

Andrew Bozio first got hooked on British literature as a junior at Louisville’s St. Xavier High School. He knew then and there he’d found his calling.

Having just finished his first year of studies in the English PhD program at the University of Michigan, Bozio credits his undergraduate experiences at UK with helping establish a foundation for his intended career in early modern literature.

A Gaines Fellow and member of the UK Honors Program, Bozio graduated from UK in December 2006 with a degree in English and minors in French and philosophy. His classes in Arts & Sciences, the Honors Program, and the Gaines Center for the Humanities program “absolutely” prepared him for his graduate level coursework, he says.

It was the combination of those three things, the skills that one program offered, another program was able to supplement and help develop,” he says