Lauren S. McKee / Atlanta, Georgia / 2011-2012 / Topic: Poetry
Project: Laura McKee is a writer and teacher in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University and her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, and New South. Her 2012 Sound Archives Fellowship research was in support of a book-length narrative poem presently in process, that is set in East Tennessee during World War II. She drew upon Berea's 1940s era recordings of folklore, religious music, and local radio programming to make possible as she says "bringing the textures of religious language and local media directly into the poem."
Marianne Worthington / Williamsburg, Kentucky / 2008-2009 / Topics: Poetry; Women in Appalachian Music
Project: Marianne Worthington is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Journalism at the University of the Cumberlands, Williamsburg, KY. Her Music Fellowship study will be in furtherance of work on a poetry manuscript in process, currently titled Knoxville Girl. She will use audio and other archival resources to enhance her knowledge of mountain music in general, to study the lives of particular women singers and folklorists in Kentucky, and to analyze specifically the words and music of murder ballads. The manuscript is directed at using poetry to tell these women's stories and to examine the issues and barriers women continue to face as artists and performers.
Marianne's poetry chapbook, Larger Bodies Than Mine, was chosen for the New Women’s Voices Series and received the 2007 Appalachian Book of the Year Award in Poetry. She has published over 40 poems in national, regional and on-line literary publications and over 60 non-fiction pieces (book reviews, essays, critical analyses, and feature-stories) in regional and scholarly journals. Her collection of poems “The Girl Singer” was published by the University Press of Kentucky in November 2021. She has also taught in the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts (KGSA) as a creative writing instructor.
