Novelist, essayist, and environmental advocate from Laurel County, Kentucky. His fiction centers Appalachian people, place, and the costs of mountaintop removal mining. He served as Kentucky Poet Laureate (2023-2024) and chairs the Appalachian Renaissance Initiative.

Kentucky Poet Laureate (2021-2022) and a founding voice of the Affrilachian Poets, a collective of Black writers from the Appalachian region. Her work brings Black Appalachian experience, rural memory, and the natural world together in lyric prose and poetry.

Appalachian novelist and teacher who writes fiction about addiction, recovery, and the opioid crisis in the region. He serves as Berea College's Appalachian Male Advocate and Mentor, supporting student success across the region.

Kentucky Poet Laureate (2013) and the writer who coined the term 'Affrilachia' to name the African American experience in Appalachia. He founded the Affrilachian Poets and edits Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture.

Poet, novelist, essayist, and farmer whose work argues for stewardship of land and community. A leading voice in agrarian and ecological thought, he writes from and about the fictional Port William membership on the Kentucky River.

Novelist, historian, and environmental writer of the Southern Appalachians. Her 1955 study The French Broad is an early work of Appalachian environmentalism, and her fiction explores race, class, and place in the mountains.

Author and former NASA engineer whose memoir of growing up in a coal camp and building rockets with the 'Rocket Boys' became the film October Sky. His work bridges Appalachian coming-of-age and science.

Novelist, short story writer, and longtime creative writing teacher. His countercultural road novel and his Kentucky short stories helped shape modern Appalachian literature; he has mentored generations of Kentucky writers.

Folklorist and scholar who founded and directed the Berea College Appalachian Center. His work preserves and interprets Appalachian religion, humor, music, and speech, and he helped define Appalachian Studies as a field.

Often called the 'dean of Appalachian literature.' For decades he lived in a log house on Dead Mare Branch and wrote poetry, fiction, and children's books rooted in the Cumberland Plateau.

Novelist who chronicled the migration of Kentucky farm families to northern industrial cities. Her work captures both the hardship of mountain farming and the dislocation of the wartime factory boom.

Feminist theorist, poet, and cultural critic who wrote more than 30 books on race, gender, class, and place. Late in life she returned to her Kentucky roots and founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College.

Novelist and short story writer whose work gives voice to Appalachian women, oral tradition, and mountain faith. Her fiction is known for its humor, dialect, and deep sense of place.

Short story writer whose small body of work is regarded as among the finest in Appalachian fiction. His stories portray the lives of rural West Virginians with precision and restraint.