
Naomi Wallace, who was born and raised in Louisville, is only the second American playwright to have a work added to the permanent repertoire of Comédie-Française, the 300-year-old French National Theatre. The other is Tennessee Williams. While Wallace’s work is better known in Europe and the Middle East than in America, that soon may change.
Frank X Walker and Crystal Wilkinson are two founding members of the Affrilachian Poets, an influential group of artists who highlight the often-ignored history and culture of rural Black people in Kentucky. Both have received national acclaim for their work.
Ron Eller was the first member of his Appalachian family to go to college, and when he studied history, he realized that his people’s history had been ignored. His career at the University of Kentucky and his landmark 2008 book Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 have focused on changing that.
These four writers will be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame along with the late David Dick, who returned to Bourbon County after two decades as a CBS News correspondent to write 14 books, most about his beloved Kentucky.
The ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be March 10 at the historic Kentucky Theatre in downtown Lexington. All four living inductees and Dick’s family plan to attend.
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 now the literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning in Lexington.