By Kentucky AuthorsUnpublished

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Kentucky has a rich culinary tradition with distinctive regional recipes that reflect the unique heritage of the commonwealth, and few know that tradition better than Linda Allison-Lewis. In the ten years since the publication of her celebrated first collection, Kentucky's Best: Fifty Years of...

A USA Today bestseller! A poignant love story about two teens whose souls come together time and again through the ages--for fans of Nina LaCour and Matt Haig. Evan Taft has plans. Take a gap year in Alaska, make sure his little brother and single mother...

"Top-notch" --USA Today "Illuminating" --Washington Post "A breath of fresh air" --Entertainment Weekly "Memorable" --People   After the sudden collapse of her family, Mim Malone is dragged from her home in...

Here, Wendell Berry revisits for the first time his immensely popularCollected Poems, whichThe New York Times Book Review described as "a straightforward search for a life connected to the soil, for marriage as a sacrament, and family life" and "[returns] American poetry to a...

Originally published in 2005, That Distant Landbrings together twenty-three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry's mastery of...

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities "Mr. Berry's sentences and stories deliver...

"Blooms has taken the voice and names of Appalachia, tended, and evolved them, and created a book that is at once haunting and hopeful."--NPR Praised by BuzzFeed, Good Housekeeping, POPSUGAR, Bustle, and more! Misty's holler looks like any of the thousands of hollers that fork...

"Haunting and hopeful...a magic so vivid it feels more like a memory than a work of fiction."--Alix E. Harrow, New York Times bestselling author of The Once and Future Witches NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK BY Good Housekeeping, Gizmodo, Den of Geek, Tor.com, and more! Walk through...

Knox Thompson thinks he's working a hustle, but it's a hustle that's working him. Trying to keep his pizza shop and parents afloat, he cleans out a backroom Kentucky poker game only to be roped into dealing marijuana by the proprietor--an arrangement Knox only halfheartedly resists. ...

No one will protect you. Months after being named the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. announced his decision to leave the public school system. His career as a high school English teacher had spanned more than a decade but ended abruptly--another casualty...

"Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County is one of the poorest counties in both Kentucky and the country. Buildings are crumbling and fields sit vacant, as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women are finding creative ways to subsist in their hollers in the hills. Cassie...

Autobiographical poetry from one of Kentucky's rising Affrilachian literary stars. Bernard Clay's autobiographical poetry debut, English Lit, juxtaposes the roots of Black male identity against an urban and rural Kentucky landscape. Hailed as one of the most authentic voices...

The most haunted neighborhood in America? That's what many are calling Old Louisville, an extensive preservation district with hundreds of old mansions and beautiful homes in Kentucky's largest city. Wherever you go in this eye-popping neighborhood, it seems that a haunted house is not far away. Or...

This true crime saga--with an eccentric Southern backdrop--introduces the reader to the story of a murder in a crumbling Louisville mansion and the decades of secrets and corruption that live within the old house's walls. On June 18, 2010, police discover a body buried in the...

In 1933 Louisville, Kentucky, even the ongoing economic depression cannot keep Piper Danson's parents from insisting on a debut party. After all, their fortune came through the market crash intact, and they've picked out the perfect suitor for their daughter. Braxton Crandall can give her the kind...

Francine Howard has her life all mapped out until the soldier she planned to marry at WWII's end writes to tell her he's in love with a woman in England. Devastated, Francine seeks a fresh start in the Appalachian Mountains, training to be a nurse midwife for the Frontier Nursing Service.

Carrie Green's Studies of Familiar Birds reflects upon the series of nest-and-egg illustrations that Virginia Jones saw to completion after her daughter, who had begun the project, died. The artist's loss in the late nineteenth century is presented in tandem with the poet's artistic...

The storytelling tradition has long been an important piece of Kentucky history and culture. Folktales, legends, tall tales, and ghost stories hold a special place in the imaginations of inventive storytellers and captive listeners. In Kentucky Folktales: Revealing Stories, Truths, and Outright Lies...

Rose McFarland is a trained killer--a Memphis S.W.A.T. sniper with a secret. Her team knows about the burn scars that lurk under her clothes, a legacy of the house fire that killed her father and brother sixteen years before. Her supervisors know that she spent two years in a rehabilitative...

Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to...

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place....

“A YOUNG WRITER OF IMMENSE GIFTS . . . One of the best books I have ever read about contemporary life in the mountains of southern Appalachia. . . . I could see and feel Free Creek, and the mountain above it.” –LEE SMITH After his mother is killed, four...

Like an old-fashioned hymn sung in rounds, Something's Rising gives a stirring voice to the lives, culture, and determination of the people fighting the destructive practice of mountaintop removal in the coalfields of central Appalachia. Each person's story, unique and unfiltered, articulates the...

"A hallucinatory nightmare of a novel that blends adventure, horror and historical fiction, and isn't shy about violence or strangeness."-New York Times "If you love wilderness horror, This Wretched Valleyis a must-read."-Alma Katsu, author...

"YA horror has found a new standard-bearer." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Dark, gripping, and gorgeous, Wake the Bones will lead you into the woods and keep you up late. As lush and sweltering as a Kentucky summer... Elizabeth Kilcoyne is a force." -...

At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family's adventure to reclaim the food they eat America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become...

National Bestseller "A blend of breathtaking artistry, encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. . . and ardent commitment to the supremacy of nature." -- San Francisco Chronicle In this beautiful novel, Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times bestselling author of Demon...

With their signature prose, at turns muscular and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings within love, time, and the self. Through encounters with a gorgeous gondolier in Venice, an ex-husband in The Netherlands, and a lost love on New Year's Eve in Mexico City, Lawson's...

SCHNEIDER FAMILY BOOK AWARD WINNER ● A poignant and lyrical young adult novel-in-verse about a Black teen coming of age in an anxiety-inducing world, from the author of For Black Girls Like Me and In the Key of Us. I'm safe here. ...

Amelia Martens's prose poems reveal expansive ideas in compressed language. From the domestic to the geopolitical, from the mundane to the miraculous, these brief vignettes take the form of prayers, parables, confessions, and revelations. Intimate and urgent, Martens's poems are strange,...

In these formally assured, richly alive poems, Jay McCoy shows us the body untamed, 'brimming / with sweat' and 'musk-ripe, ' driven by hunger and need, slipping beyond will and art. I admire these poems for their candor, their exuberant lyricism, their grief, their vibrant, queer vernacular. The...

For twenty years, diners in the Bluegrass have been able to satisfy their cravings for Ouita Michel's sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine at her many acclaimed restaurants. Each restaurant--from Wallace Station to Holly Hill Inn--features dishes that combine Kentucky's bounty with Michel's...

Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, articulated a vision of a community that embraced sacrifice over the needs of the individual; the result was one of the most successful utopian experiments of nineteenth-century America. The Shakers, an idealistic offshoot of the ascetic Quaker religion,...

Few men have been more important to the life of Kentucky than three of those who governed it between 1930 and 1963--Albert B. Chandler, Earle C. Clements, and Bert T. Combs. While reams of newspaper copy have been written about them, the historical record offers little to mark their roles in the...

Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Danni Quintos carves a space for brown girls and weird girls in her debut collection of poems. Two Brown Dots explores what it means to be a racially ambiguous, multiethnic, Asian American...

These Prisoning Hills is a post-apocalyptic Appalachian "weird fiction" novella by Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Christopher Rowe. "Haunting and heartfelt, violent and vibrant."--Alix E. Harrow Deallocate all implications, Fortran harrows...

Who knew fighting for a living wage could be so deadly? Bernie Sanders and his Gen Z intern are drawn into a murder investigation in a small Vermont town in this hilarious spin on cozy mysteries from the New York Times bestselling author of Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery<...

The Officemeets Stephen King, dressed up in holiday tinsel, in this fun, festive, and frightening horror-comedy set during the horror publishing boom of the '80s, by New York Times best-selling satirist Andrew Shaffer. Out of work for months, Lussi Meyer is...

First published in 1940, James Still's masterful novel has become a classic. It is the story, seen through the eyes of a boy, of three years in the life of his family and their kin. He sees his parents pulled between the meager farm with its sense of independence and the mining camp with its...

"They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long." Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound...

A powerful collection from Frank X Walker, winner of the 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. In this collection of sixty-eight poems, Kentucky writer Frank X Walker continues the personal poetic writing of his bestselling debut collection, Affrilachia. In Black Box, he...

"A wildly original novel that pulses with heart and truth . . . That this powerful exploration of friendship, desire, ambition, and secrets manages to be ebullient, gripping, heartbreaking, and deeply deeply funny is a testament to Kayla Rae Whitaker's formidable gifts. I was so sorry to...

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER . A lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden legacy of Black Appalachians, throughpowerful storytelling alongside nearly forty comforting recipes, from the former poetlaureate of Kentucky."With Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts,...

Feminism, Appalachian culture, and country music: three threads beautifully woven into one in Marianne Worthington's poetry collection The Girl Singer. The poet grew up in urban Appalachia, listening to country and folk music and letting it live within her. The speakers in The...