What started nearly four decades ago as an opportunity for readers to meet their favorite Kentucky authors has expanded this year to a week-long celebration of literary works and the authors who create them.
The first annual Kentucky Book Festival kicks off in Lexington on Nov. 12 and culminates Saturday, Nov. 17, with the 37th annual Kentucky Book Fair. Transylvania faculty and alumni are among the featured authors.
Professor Jeremy Paden is one of four authors kicking off the festival at the New Kentucky Poetry and Prose event on Monday, Nov. 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Paden, a poet and Spanish professor, will join novelists Willie Davis and Robert Gipe and poet Maureen Morehead as they each read from new works.
On Thursday, Nov. 15, Transylvania hosts a new festival event, Cocktails and Conversation, which welcomes a national-level author to Kentucky. This year, the festival invited Beck Dorey-Stein, author of “From the Corner of the Oval,” to Lexington. Moderated by KET’s Renee Shaw, the conversation with Stein focuses on her “unlikely tenure as a stenographer in the Obama White House.” Tickets are required for this event and are available online via the Kentucky Book Festival website.
The Nov. 17 Kentucky Book Fair brings readers together with their favorite authors. In addition to Paden, Richard Taylor, who is Transy’s Kenan Visiting Writer and a former Kentucky poet laureate, is participating. Taylor’s new book, “Elkhorn: Evolution of a Kentucky Landscape,” received this year’s Thomas D. Clark Medallion.
Bianca Spriggs ’03, a writer, multidisciplinary artist and assistant professor of English at Ohio University, is also attending. Spriggs and Paden co-edited “Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poets,” which was reprinted by the University Press of Kentucky earlier this year.
For a full schedule of events, list of authors and additional information, visit the Kentucky Book Festival website.