By Robby Hardesty M
LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 17, 2025) — Crystal Wilkinson, the Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor and director of the Division of Creative Writing in the University of Kentucky's College of Arts and Sciences, will present UK Libraries’ 2025 Edward F. Prichard Lecture.
By Richard LeComte
LEXINGTON, Ky. – Tom Marksbury, professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts and Sciences, co-directed a documentary that was honored in 2024 at the San Francisco Docfest.
The film will have its Lexington premiere at 6 p.m. Sunday, March 16, at the Kentucky Theatre. The event will be a fund-raiser for the Faulkner Morgan Archive. The Writing Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Department is presenting the event.
The documentary, “Bob Morgan's Just Going to Tell Some Stories,” received the Grand Jury Prize for Excellence in Profiles. Co-directed by Grayson Tyler Johnson, “Stories” profiles Bob Morgan, a Kentucky assemblage artist who discusses “art and garbage, sex and drugs, aids grief, cultural subversion and being an outsider turned community icon,” according to the Internet Movie Database. An online discussion of the documentary can be found here.
"I started this project because I wanted to see if I could build a whole documentary around just one person, and Bob Morgan — as an artist, activist, historian and archivist and most of all raconteur — was the only personality big enough to do that,” Marksbury said. “He is large; he contains multitudes."
The film received three sold-out showings at the Sidewalk Festival in Birmingham, Alabama, and will be featured this summer at the Georgia Film Festival, Marksbury said.
Please join us this Friday in the MLK Center @ 5pm for our first spring semester Incubator where MFA candidates read their in-progress work! Undergraduate students are welcome to sign up for an open mic prior to the MFA readings!
If you are teaching this semester, please encourage your classes to attend!
Work on fun Valentine’s and romance themed creative prompts or come to share work of your own that you would like feedback on!
Graduating MFA students will read short excerpts from their theses. All are invited to this bittersweet, yet joyous event.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 3, 2025) — Three writers and educators with ties to the University of Kentucky will be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Tania James is an associate professor of English in the MFA program at George Mason University. She is the author of four works of fiction, all published by Knopf:
Her short stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing; Granta; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; and One Story, among other places, and featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Fulbright Program.
POSTPONED
Kiese Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of "Long Division," which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America," named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times.
Laymon’s bestselling "Heavy: An American Memoir," won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. It was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year.
Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books "Good God" and "City Summer, Country Summer" and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. The program helps young people in Jackson grow more comfortable with reading, writing, revising and sharing their work. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
