This year's living inductees are George C. Wolfe, three-time Tony award-winning director of plays and movies; Fenton Johnson, who wrote the first major work of fiction about the impact of the AIDS crisis on rural America; and Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, whose novel Come and Go, Molly Snow is a classic Kentucky story.
The 2024 posthumous inductees are National Book Award-winning novelist Mary Lee Settle, Paul Brett Johnson, a landscape painter who wrote and illustrated children’s books; and Billy C. Clark, whose autobiography was considered by Time magazine to be “as authentically American as Huckleberry Finn.”
In addition to inducting six new writers, the second Kentucky Literary Impact award will be presented to the late Mike Mullins, who was director of the Hindman Settlement School from 1977 until his death in 2012. As director, he built the annual Appalachian Writers Workshop into a nationally known program and promoted the careers of many Kentucky writers.
The award ceremony will take place on Monday March 25th at the Kentucky Theatre.