Leatha Kendrick and Georgia Green Stamper

2720 Frankfort Avenue,Louisville KY 40206

22 September, 2022

Description

Poet Leatha Kendrick’s latest book, And Luckier, came out in April, 2020, from Accents Publishing, just as the coronavirus pandemic shut down the United States. The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning presented her debut reading from the collection in their Carnegie Center from the Couch series. The book’s opening poem, “Your Fear,” was featured on Rattle’s Poets Respond in December, 2018. The poem speaks to the intersections between our experience of “the news” and the shifting emotions we experience as individuals and society. It explores how the daily newsfeed, whether by design or not, shapes our reality, stoking fears and, often, a sense of helplessness. Poet, writer, and activist, George Ella Lyon, cites the first line of “Your Fear” in her blurb for Kendrick’s new book: “And Luckier opens with a dispassionate question: ‘who might it serve that you / would grow downhearted?’ The poems that follow take us through many voices, subjects, and perspectives, bringing us at last to this hard-won counsel: ‘So much suffering. We cannot uncause it / But we can set ourselves to mend, / … I will pick up the rubble. / I will carry one stone at a time.’” Lyon asserts that “Kendrick’s powerful fifth collection springs from a mature poet’s reckoning: with the family she was given and the family she has made, with the struggle to answer her calling as an artist, with the dangers and diminishments of age, and with her privileged place in a suffering world.” Poet and memoirist, Pauletta Hansel quotes another line from “Your Fear”: “ ‘What will your seeing make?’ Kendrick asks in her opening poem. Hers has made these poems of witness and of healing, and we, her readers, are all the luckier for them.” Leatha Kendrick grew up on a southern Kentucky farm, daughter of a veterinarian and a high school home economics teacher. Oldest of four children, she was most at home in fields or barns (when not reading a book on the window seat and looking out at the horizon). Her adult life was spent eastern Kentucky where she and her husband raised three daughters. Kendrick began writing seriously in midlife and found her first community of writers at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at historic Hindman Settlement School. She received her MFA in Poetry (at the age of 45) from Vermont College of Fine Arts. :::::: Small Acreages completes a trilogy of connected essays told in Georgia Green Stamper’s unique Kentucky voice. In Small Acreages, readers are returned to Stamper’s Eagle Creek world and its colorful characters, but her voice has both deepened with time and widened to include her journey beyond Natlee. Many of the essays in this new collection are reflective or as Stamper phrases it, she hopes “to add a handful of words to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human.” Her wry humor endures, however, popping into even the most poignant of pieces, grounding her, cutting through the absurd as her daddy taught her to do, reminding her as her mother did that “you might as well laugh.” “Georgia Green Stamper’s essays do that most important thing that only the most accomplished writers are sometimes lucky to do: capture and preserve a place, a time, and its people. Stamper’s eye is sharp, and her pen is doubly so.” - Silas House, author of Southernmost “Georgia Green Stamper is a writers’ writer.” - Bill Goodman, Executive Director of Kentucky Humanities “Georgia Green Stamper is a wonderfully original writer. She is to Kentucky what Bailey White is to Georgia... ” – Gwyn Hyman Rubio, author of Icy Sparks Georgia Green Stamper is a southern writer, speaker, and teacher. She is the author of three creative non-fiction books, and her essays have appeared in multiple anthologies. She contributes work regularly to Kentucky Humanities and other periodicals and newspapers.