George C. Wolfe is most famous as a three-time Tony Award-winning director of plays and movies, including his new film Rustin, a biographical drama about the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. But the Frankfort native has always been a writer at heart. He is the author of such plays and musicals as Spunk, The Colored Museum, Jelly’s Last Jam and Shuffle Along and was the lyricist for Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, for which he won a Tony as director.
Fenton Johnson is a wide-ranging author: memoirs, fiction, essays and nonfiction books that explore global themes such as love, family, faith and community. More often than not, those themes are viewed through the lens of his upbringing in the Nelson County community of New Haven. His 1994 novel Scissors, Paper, Rock was the first major work of fiction about the impact of the AIDS crisis on rural America.
Mary Ann Taylor-Hall grew up in Florida and lived a nomadic life until she moved to Kentucky, where her family had deep roots. Her novels, stories and poetry are inseparable from the landscape of rural Harrison County, where she has found inspiration for nearly five decades. Her novel Come and Go, Molly Snow is a classic Kentucky story.
These three living writers will be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame on March 25 in a ceremony at the historic Kentucky Theatre in Lexington. Joining them will be three deceased writers: Paul Brett Johnson, a landscape painter who wrote and illustrated children’s books; Mary Lee Settle, a National Book Award-winning novelist; and Billy C. Clark, whose memoirs and stories told of river life around his native Eastern Kentucky, where the Big Sandy meets the Ohio.
BELOW learn more about these Kentucky literary icons, written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is now the literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning.
2024 Inductees