Kentucky Voices 

Kathleen Driskell has authored six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025). Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award; and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her individual poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines; and her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. She is professor of creative writing and chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she lives with her husband in an old country church built before the American Civil War.

Dave Harrity is a writer, artist, and teacher from Louisville. He is the author of two books of poetry, These Intricacies (Cascade Books, 2015) and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf (WordFarm, 2016), and Making Manifest (Seedbed, 2013) a craft manual of meditations and writing exercises for individual creative practice and communal formation. A recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship and an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council, a William Alexander II and Lisa Percy Fellow at the Rivendell Writers’ Colony, and a former board member of ARC (artsreligionculture.org), he travels the country teaching workshops on contemplative writing, creativity, and poetry.

Leatha Kendrick grew up on a southern Kentucky farm, daughter of a veterinarian and a high school home economics teacher. Her poetry and essays appear in anthologies and journals, including Appalachian Journal, Good River Review, Kansas City Review, Red Branch Review, and Southern Poetry Review. She is the recipient of two Al Smith Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as the Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. In 2025, her work was honored with the Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her six poetry collections include And Luckier (Accents, 2020) and Interior with Poplar (Madville Publishing, 2026). 

Shauna M. Morgan is a poet-scholar and associate professor of creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in A Gathering Together, Interviewing the Caribbean, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, and her debut collection, Ground Provisions, was published by Peepal Tree Press in the United Kingdom. Shauna tends a small, hopeful provision ground at her home in the East End Artists’ Village in Lexington, and she continues to explore the environmental and cultural linkages between her rural Afro-Indo-Jamaican upbringing and her U.S.-Kentucky life.