Nikky Finney, winner of some of poetry’s most prestigious prizes and an essential American voice on such subjects as Black history, social justice and the power of community, is the newest living inductee into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Finney, 63, a South Carolina native who says she became a writer during the 23½ years she lived and worked in Kentucky, was inducted at 7 p.m. on Jan. 27 in an online ceremony. This year’s other inductees are journalist John Egerton (1935-2013), historian and biographer Robert K. Massie III (1929-2019), balladeer John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), novelist and short story writer Caroline Gordon (1895-1981), and poet and educator Albert Stewart (1914-2001).
They bring to 50 the number of writers inducted into the Hall of Fame, which was created by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in 2012 to recognize outstanding writers with strong ties to Kentucky. Members are chosen by committees at the Carnegie Center and the Kentucky Arts Council that include some of the state’s most accomplished writers.
Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section, written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is the Carnegie Center’s literary arts liaison.
Forrest Clonts
Poet Nikky Finney. Photo by Forrest Clonts
Nikki Finney
Nikky Finney was born and raised in South Carolina, and she moved back there in 2013 to be closer to her aging parents. But the acclaimed poet is emphatic on this point: It was during the 23 years and six months she lived in Kentucky that she became a writer.
“Twenty-three years, six months is a long period of time, no matter when it comes in a life,” she said in a recent interview. “But it came right in that incredibly central moment—30 to 53—and if you live long enough, you get to see that as a moment where, hopefully, you are making your mark in the world.”
Finney said she found it “slightly mesmerizing” to be chosen as this year’s living inductee into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. She joins previous living inductees Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, bell hooks, Barbara Kingsolver, Gayl Jones, Gurney Norman, Ed McClanahan and Sena Jeter Naslund.
The Hall of Fame is one of many groups recognizing the mark Finney has made in the world. The poet’s powerful, visual and musical use of language has made her an essential American voice on such timely topics as Black history, women’s history, racism, social justice and the power of community.
Finney, 63, received three prominent honors in 2020. She won the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, and the University of the South’s $10,000 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She also was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Finney has attracted a global following since winning the 2011 National Book Award for her poetry collection Head Off & Split and delivering an electrifying acceptance speech that went viral online. While thanking family, mentors and colleagues, Finney put her award into historical context by poetically explaining that Black people in South Carolina were once legally forbidden from learning to read or write.
“Well, there’s going to be two more acceptance speeches tonight, and I don’t want you two winners to be intimidated,” the awards show host John Lithgow said as Finney left the stage, “but that was the best acceptance speech for anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”
YouTube videos of the speech have been viewed more than 68,000 times. The video and Finney’s books were part of the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. “That speech has introduced me around the world to so many people,” she said. “I’m still amazed.”
She also is still amazed by how she was embraced by her Kentucky community.
The morning after the National Book Award finalists were announced, Finney took her usual four-mile walk. As she passed Thoroughbred Antiques on East Main Street, owner Jerry Shrout was out sweeping the sidewalk. She said that he looked up for a moment and called out to her: “Hey, you’re gonna win!” She was startled. “He just kind of sends a lasso of words across the street,” she said. “He doesn’t look up but a second. He’s not waiting for my response. He’s just telling me what he knows.”
When Finney flew back from New York after the ceremony, she arrived at Blue Grass Airport late at night. With the trophy in hand, she walked toward baggage claim and began hearing a loud commotion. As she descended the escalator, she saw her friend Joan Brannon and 20 women gathered in the mostly empty terminal, serenading her with African drums.
“They were drumming my homecoming,” she said. “Joan said, ‘We won, Nikky!’ I started to cry. I’m like, who would do this for me except people who had watched me put words together, listened to me at the Carnegie Center, been there to support me? They didn’t have to do that. It was a crazy hour of the night. I don’t care what I win in this world, that was the award for me. That was it: that I had a place that felt so strongly about me.
“Kentucky is the country where I became a writer. It’s always why I say I left Kentucky after all that time, but I keep a part of it tucked deep inside me.”
A Child of Books
Lynn Carol Finney was one of three children, and the only daughter, born to Frances and Ernest A. Finney Jr., a civil rights lawyer who became a state legislator and the first Black person elected chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. She grew up in Sumter and attended public and parochial schools. She loved to read and write as a child. Her parents rarely passed up an opportunity to buy her a book.
Finney, who acquired the nickname Nikky in college, earned a B.A. from Talladega College in 1979 and studied African-American literature at Atlanta University. She focused on photography and poetry.
“I think the thing [about poetry] that captured my imagination is the complexity that a word can have,” Finney said. “A single word’s ability to fit one way and be turned another to reflect more light or a different kind of light. I also love the music that happens in the language when you care certain words together or when you etch a line on the page. I’m always paying attention to those two things: the way the light hits the word and also the sound.”
Finney became a more serious poet after a mentor, the late writer Toni Cade Bambara, asked her a pointed question. “She said, ‘So, you can write pretty. So what?’ ” Finney recalled. “I realized in that moment that the sound of words and that dimension that I’m talking about could move a mind like a drum, could have a heartbeat and a consciousness that could tell a story.”
Still, Finney had a lot to learn. She left Atlanta University in a dispute about the format of her master’s thesis. She finished her first poetry collection, On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), and moved to California, where she earned money by managing a Kinko’s copy shop, as she had done in Atlanta.
It was during this time that she attended a Black writers’ conference in South Carolina and received another piece of advice that would change her life. Writer Percival Everett told her that “a poet could find a better way to work on her next book than by running a copy machine all day,” she said. “He had my full attention.” Everett was then teaching at the University of Kentucky. He helped arrange for Finney to come to UK for nine months as a writer-in-residence, which provided her first taste of teaching and lots of time to write. “I said, ‘Yeah, I can do this,’ ” she said. “Nine months. Nine months only.”
So how did nine months turn into 23 years?
“I realized that I had colleagues all around me—Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall, Wendell Berry,” she said. “There were critical people in the community, Doris Wilkinson, and a colleague, Jane Vance, who were incredibly supportive of me, of leaving me alone but also being there if I needed them. My self-evaluation was: You may not think you need to be in Kentucky, but there is something here that is working for you to be successful.”
While looking for a quiet, well-lit place to write, Finney discovered the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, housed in Lexington’s beautiful old Carnegie Library. Although much of the building bustled with after-school tutoring and adult writing classes, there were cubby spaces tucked away in a big, quiet room.
“The air was good for writers there,” she said. “I went every day and scribbled out what became Rice,” her second poetry collection. She became active in the Carnegie Center’s literary community and was a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets group.
“The Carnegie Center was central in that understanding of how important books were to this little community called Lexington,” she said. “I kept finding people of all socioeconomic backgrounds who loved books, who loved reading. I would see and meet people in Joseph-Beth [Booksellers], and they didn’t want to be writers; they weren’t all artsy. These were working-class people who had books under their arms for themselves, for their children, for people in their families. I had never lived in a place like that. Other places in Kentucky are like that, too, because I went all over the state, reading and teaching.”
Finney spent more than two decades on UK’s English faculty, with stints as a visiting professor at Berea College and Smith College in Massachusetts. After Rice (1995), she published a book of short prose, Heartwood (1997), and another poetry collection, The World Is Round (2003). She edited an anthology, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007).
Briefly among her colleagues was Guy Davenport, a writer who retired from UK in 1990 after winning a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” Finney said she never got to know Davenport beyond exchanging pleasantries in the hallway. But after he died in 2005, his longtime partner, Bonnie Jean Cox, offered to sell her his house in the Bell Court neighborhood. In 2012, UK named her the first Guy Davenport Endowed English Professor.
Finney wonders if her ties to Davenport go even deeper. He was from the same part of South Carolina as her mother, whose maiden name is Davenport. “I always wanted to go search the books,” she said. “In the next two years, I plan to go to the courthouse there and see, is this a crazy feeling I have?” Southern genealogy can be, well, complicated.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Poet Nikky Finney. Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Look Back, Look Forward
Finney had a special bond with her father. After he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she left UK in 2013 for the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where she is now the John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, with appointments in both the English Language and Literature and African American Studies programs.
During the last six months of his life, Ernest Finney lost his ability to speak. Missing the sound of his voice, the daughter he had always called “Love Child” began re-reading 300 or so letters he had sent her over the years. That experience became a seed for her newest book, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry (2020).
The book is mostly poems she wrote to mark occasions. It also includes notes and bits of verse from her journal, which the avid gardener describes as her “hot bed” for ideas, similar to a hot bed for sprouting seeds. Amid these poems are images of some of her father’s letters, family photos and other personal ephemera, such as a newspaper advertisement for her first poetry reading—in her hometown Kroger store. “I was between the cheese and the goat milk,” she said, laughing at the memory. “Ladies would come by shopping and say, ‘What are you selling, darling?’ and I would say, ‘Poetry!’ And they would be like, ‘OK! Next time!’ ”
Love Child was published in April, just as the pandemic hit. A 20-city book tour was canceled, and what readings she could do were online, which was hard for someone who loves personal interaction. “Yet, there is a new intimacy that is keeping us going by way of the computer,” she said. “My book has taken flight in a different way” to a broader, international audience.
“You have to be open in this life, no matter how old you are and no matter how many times you go to your desk and work on something, to it not happening in the way you want to, but happening in the way that it is and adjust,” she said. “I think that adjustment is critical to poets remaining central to the discourse and the conversations that we need to have with each other.”
In addition to promoting her book, Finney has been hard at work on a new project. “It’s a long story, but I’m not sure [of] the form just yet,” she said. “It has to do with the arrival of Black people in America … It has to do with coming home and realizing that South Carolina was such a portal of entry for Black people and Black culture.”
She also has been thinking about the poet’s role in times of social and political upheaval, as we have experienced in the past year with a global pandemic, a divisive president and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The poet is the one who remembers and reminds us of what it means to be a human being,” Finney said. “I especially believe that is true right now. We have to as human beings remember what it’s like to lean in close to another human being and whisper something, because we can’t do that right now. So the poet’s job right now is to not look away; it is to look at where we are and cite those truths, but also to remind us we are human and what we from each other.”
Alex Remnick Random House
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Robert K. Massie. Photo by Alex Remnick/Random House
Robert Kinloch Massie III was a journalist, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who gained fame by writing popular,
critically acclaimed books about the House of Romanov, Russia’s imperial family for two centuries. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra became a movie, and Peter the Great was made into a network TV miniseries.
Massie was born Jan. 5, 1929, in Lexington. His father, Robert K. Massie Jr., operated the Massie School, a boys preparatory academy in Versailles, from 1918 to 1929. When Massie was 15 months old, his father died. His mother, Molly Kimball Massie, a progressive activist, married James Todd, a Lexington department store executive. The family later moved from Lexington to Nashville, Tennessee.
Massie earned degrees in American studies from Yale University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. After serving in the Navy, he worked as a journalist for The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Newsweek magazines. He later taught at Princeton and Tulane universities. He was president of The Authors Guild (1987-1991).
His most famous book was Nicholas and Alexandra (1967) about the last Romanov rulers. They abdicated in 1917 amid the Russian Revolution and were murdered, along with their five children, by Communists after 16 months in captivity. The book, which The New York Times called one of the most popular historical studies ever published, sold more than 4.5 million copies and was adapted into a 1971 film of the same name starring Laurence Olivier.
Massie won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography with Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980). The book was the basis for the 1986 NBC miniseries Peter the Great, which starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave and won three Emmy Awards. His book Catherine the Great (2011) won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Massie’s other books included: Last Courts of Europe: Royal Family Album, 1860-1914 (1981); Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (1991); There’s an Old Southern Saying: The Wit and Wisdom of Dan May (1993); The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (1995); and Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (2004).
In The New York Times obituary of Massie, reporter Douglas Martin described his books as “gripping, tautly narrated and immensely popular … Mr. Massie captivated audiences with detailed accounts that read to many like engrossing novels.”
Massie married Suzanne Rohrbach, a Swiss diplomat’s daughter who became a noted Russian scholar, in 1954. They had three children: Robert, Susanna and Elizabeth. He became interested in Russian history while researching hemophilia, a bleeding disease that affected their son, Bob. (Nicholas and Alexandra’s son, Alexei, may have been history’s most famous case of childhood hemophilia.) The Massies together wrote the book Journey (1975) about their son’s illness and its effect on the family.
The Massies divorced in 1990. Two years later, Robert married Deborah Karl, his literary agent. They had three children: Christopher, Sophia and Nora. Robert died Dec. 2, 2019, in Irvington, New York.
John Jacob Niles. Photo from UK Special Collections
John Jacob Niles was an author, composer, singer and collector of traditional ballads who had a major influence on the American folk music revival of the 1950s and ’60s.
Niles was born April 28, 1892, in Louisville to a musical family. His great-grandfather was a composer, organist and cello manufacturer. His mother, Lula Sarah Reisch, played organ and piano, was a church organist, and taught him musical shorthand and music theory.
At 16, Niles composed “Go ’Way From My Window,” which became one of his signature songs. It has been recorded by dozens of artists, from Marlene Dietrich and Harry Belafonte to Joan Baez and Linda Ronstadt. Bob Dylan borrowed its title for the first line of his song “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
After graduating from high school, Niles worked for the Burroughs adding machine company (1910-1917) in Appalachian Kentucky and collected folk songs on his travels. During World War I, he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Service, working primarily as a pilot ferrying aircraft to the front lines. After the war, Niles studied music in Paris and Cincinnati. He sang opera in Chicago and folk songs on New York radio programs.
Niles’ early musical interests focused on Appalachian ballads and African-American songs and spirituals. His first book, Singing Soldiers (1927), was a collection of Black soldiers’ songs from World War I. Over the years, he recorded eight albums and wrote a dozen books, most of them collections of songs and ballads.
From 1927-1934, Niles also collected Appalachian ballads as he accompanied photographer Doris Ulmann on her expeditions to photograph mountain people in eastern Kentucky. His published ballad collections frequently included material he had collected as well as composed, such as his famous Christmas song “I Wonder as I Wander” and his new tune for the traditional Scottish/Appalachian ballad “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” He toured Europe and America with singer Marion Kerby in the 1930s and performed at the White House in 1938.
Niles appeared at the Newport Folk Festival during the 1950s. Later in his career, he composed classical art songs for solo voice and piano as well as choral music. Niles became friends with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (a 2014 Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame inductee) and wrote 22 art songs based on Merton’s poetry. Niles collaborated and performed frequently with singer Jacqueline Roberts and accompanists Janelle Dishman and Nancy Field during the last dozen years of his life. On stage, Niles sang in a quirky high-pitched voice and played dulcimers and lutes that he made himself.
Niles married Rena Lipetz in 1936. They had two sons, Thomas Michael Tolliver and John Edward, and lived on Boot Hill Farm in Clark County. He was a woodcarver and built many of the instruments he performed with, some of which are now on display at the University of Kentucky’s John Jacob Niles Center for American Music. Niles died in Lexington on March 1, 1980.
Terry Price
John Egerton. Photo by Terry Price
Journalist John Egerton spent his career trying to understand the South by writing about its history, culture and food. His writing defied regional clichés and stereotypes, and championed things close to his heart, such as racial understanding, social justice and good country ham.
Egerton was born June 14, 1935, in Atlanta, one of five children of traveling salesman William G. Egerton and Rebecca White Egerton. Within a month or two of his birth, the family moved to Cadiz, where Rebecca Egerton had relatives. John Egerton graduated from Trigg County High School in 1953, attended Western Kentucky University (1953-1954), and served in the U.S. Army (1954-1956). He earned a bachelor’s degree in topical studies (1958) and a master’s degree in political science (1960) from the University of Kentucky.
Egerton worked in public relations for the University of Kentucky (1958-1960) and the University of South Florida (1960-1965). He was a Nashville-based staff writer (1965-1971) for the magazine Southern Education Report and its successor, Race Relations Reporter, before launching a freelance career. He contributed articles to several magazines, newspapers and the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council.
His 1987 book Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History explored the history and culture of the region’s cuisine with an emphasis on unsung contributions of Black cooks. Following the book’s success, Egerton wrote a syndicated food column for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other Southern newspapers (1988-1989). Egerton was one of the founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in 1999. The alliance established the annual John Egerton Prize in 2007 for art, writing and scholarship that “addresses issues of race, class, gender, and social and environmental justice, through the lens of food.”
Egerton’s other masterpiece was Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (1994), an ambitious memoir and history book that explored how progressive Blacks and Whites laid the groundwork in the 1930s and ’40s for dismantling segregation in the South. It won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
He wrote seven other nonfiction books: A Mind to Stay Here (1970); The Americanization of Dixie (1974); Visions of Utopia: Nashoba, Rugby, Ruskin, and the “New Communities” in Tennessee’s Past (1977); Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries, 1780-1980 (1979); Generations: An American Family (1983), a chronicle of the Ledford family of Lancaster, Kentucky, which won the Weatherford and Lillian Smith book awards; Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture (1990); Shades of Gray: Dispatches from the Modern South (1991); and Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves (2006), a “political fable.”
Egerton was a journalist-in-residence at Virginia Tech (1977-1978) and a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Texas in 1997. He was a friend and mentor to many writers, cherished for his wise counsel and humble good humor.
He was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2004 and the UK Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2010. He received the UK Libraries’ Award for Intellectual Achievement in 2013.
Egerton died of a heart attack at his home on Nov. 21, 2013. He and his wife, Ann Bleidt Egerton, had two sons, Brooks and March.
Caroline Gordon
Caroline Ferguson Gordon was a novelist and short story writer who explored themes of the history and evolution of Southern families. She also was a literary critic who became a mentor and friend to many of America’s best-known 20th century writers.
Gordon was born Oct. 6, 1895, in Todd County, the daughter of James Morris Gordon, a teacher from Virginia who lived there and married Nancy Meriwether, who was from a prominent local family. James Gordon established a school in nearby Clarksville, Tennessee, where the future novelist received her early education. An idealized version of Gordon’s father is a major character in her second novel, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and her award-winning story “Old Red” (1934).
She was a prolific author. Her other books were: Penhally (1931); None Shall Look Back (1937); The Garden of Adonis (1937); Green Centuries (1941); The Women on the Porch (1944); The Forest of the South (1945); The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story, written with poet Allen Tate (1950); The Strange Children (1951); The Malefactors (1956); A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1957); How to Read a Novel (1957); Old Red and Other Stories (1963); The Glory of Hera (1972); and The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon (1981).
Gordon earned a bachelor’s degree from Bethany College in West Virginia in 1916. After working two years as a teacher at Clarksville High School, she became a reporter for The Chattanooga News in 1920. She wrote about and became involved with the Fugitives, a group of poets and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Robert Penn Warren, a Todd County neighbor, introduced her to Allen Tate in 1924. A year later, Gordon and Tate were married and living in New York, where she gave birth to their daughter, Nancy Meriwether Tate (Wood). The couple later lived in London, where Gordon was secretary to the British writer Ford Madox Ford, and Paris, where they became friends with many American expatriate writers.
Gordon and Tate returned to the United States in 1930 and settled in Clarksville, where she enjoyed a productive period of writing. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 and a second-place O. Henry Prize. Tate and Gordon were active correspondents and gracious hosts. Their houseguests included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot. Gordon became a mentor to several writers, most notably Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. The legendary Max Perkins was her editor at Scribner’s, and William Faulkner was among her biggest fans.
Gordon is considered part of the Southern Renaissance literary movement that included authors ranging from Faulkner to Margaret Mitchell to Zora Neale Hurston. They sought in different ways to move beyond decades of historical romance literature and provide more of a realistic and diverse look at the complicated region.
“Her territory is the South—specifically Kentucky, in that time not so long ago when families still kept track of first cousins twice removed, and when the men spent their days hunting while the women, left behind, sat languorously on the gallery,” novelist Anne Tyler wrote in a 1981 New York Times review of The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon. “The extraordinary vigor of her Collected Stories arises from the fact that Caroline Gordon’s heart lies more with the hunters than with those women on the gallery. No scent of faded lavender drifts from these pages. Instead, there’s the smell of frost and blood and wood smoke.”
Gordon lived in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1939-1942 while Tate was poet-in-residence at Princeton University, then moved to Monteagle, Tennessee. The couple divorced in 1945, remarried in 1946, and divorced again in 1959. Gordon left Princeton in 1973 to teach in the creative writing program at the University of Dallas. Amid health problems in 1978, she moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chapas, Mexico, where her daughter and son-in-law lived. She died there on April 11, 1981, after suffering a stroke.
Albert Stewart
Albert F. Stewart, a poet, teacher and editor, has been called the patron saint of two generations of Appalachian writers. He started what became the annual Appalachian Writers’ Workshop and founded and edited Appalachian Heritage magazine, which published many of the region’s emerging writers and poets.
Stewart published three volumes of poetry: The Untoward Hills (1962), The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild (1993), and A Man of Circumstance & Selected Yellow Mountain Poems, 1946-1996 (1996).
“Albert Stewart worked all his life to cultivate the literary fields of Kentucky so that younger writers might find opportunity,” wrote Gurney Norman, a 2019 Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame inductee. “As poet, teacher, editor, publisher and organizer of writers’ conferences, and as a personal mentor to young writers for 50 years, myself among them, Al Stewart designed his own literary career, a career equal in value to that of any post-war Kentucky writer.”
Stewart was born July 17, 1914, on Yellow Mountain in Knott County, the son of William and Lucinda Sparkman Stewart. His mother died in childbirth when he was 2, and Stewart moved to Hindman Settlement School at age 5. Novelist Lucy Furman, a 2020 Hall of Fame inductee who taught at the school, “practically adopted me,” Stewart said. She also became his literary mentor. Stewart graduated from Hindman High School in 1932 and Berea College in 1936. He earned a master of arts degree from the University of Kentucky in 1943.
Following Navy service in the South Pacific during World War II, Stewart had a lifelong career in education. After teaching English and biology in several high schools in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio, he taught English at the University of Kentucky in the 1950s while working on a doctorate he never completed. He moved on to teaching jobs at Caney Junior College, Morehead State University and Alice Lloyd College.
He founded Appalachian Heritage magazine in 1972 and edited it for 12 years—first at Alice Lloyd College and then at Hindman Settlement School. “There was so much claptrap being written about people in the area; I thought I’d just do a magazine that showed everybody wasn’t a poverty-stricken moron up here,” he said. After Stewart retired as editor, the magazine moved to Berea College and was later renamed Appalachian Review. Stewart organized what became the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in 1977 and taught there for many years.
Berea College named him a distinguished alumnus in 1993, and Morehead State University honored him with the Appalachian Treasure Award in 1995.
When state highway planners decided in 1976 to build a new Ky. Route 80 between Prestonsburg and Hazard, the highway went through Stewart’s 300-acre ancestral farm, which he called the “Kingdom of Yellow Mountain” and was the inspiration for his nature poetry. Stewart fought the plan but lost. His home—a large cabin built by his grandfather—was moved several hundred yards away to save it from destruction. He later donated most of the property to the University of Kentucky on the condition that the trees and underground minerals be preserved.
Stewart was married and divorced twice. He had two sons, Michael and Charles. He died April 1, 2001, in Knott County.