Browse A-Z Authors: Su-Sz

As one of the first voices of the University of Kentucky men's basketball program, Claude Sullivan (1924--1967) became a nationally known sportscasting pioneer. His career followed Kentucky's rise to prominence as he announced the first four NCAA championship titles under Coach Adolph Rupp and covered scrimmages during the canceled 1952--1953 season following the NCAA sanctions scandal. Sullivan also revolutionized the coverage of the UK football program with the introduction of a coach's show with Bear Bryant -- a national first that gained significant attention and later became a staple at other institutions. Sullivan's reputation in Kentucky eventually propelled him to Cincinnati, where he became the voice of the Reds, and even to the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome. In Voice of the Wildcats: Claude Sullivan and the Rise of Modern Sportscasting, Claude's son Alan, along with Joe Cox, offers an engaging and heartfelt look at the sportscaster's life and the context in which he built his career. The 1940s witnessed a tremendous growth in sportscasting across the country, and Sullivan, a seventeen year old from Winchester, Kentucky, entered the field when it was still a novel occupation that was paving new roads for broadcast reporting. During the height of his career, Sullivan was named Kentucky's Outstanding Broadcaster by the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters for eight consecutive years. His success was tragically cut short when he passed away from throat cancer at forty-two Featuring dozens of interviews and correspondence with sports legends, including Wallace "Wah Wah" Jones, Babe Parilli, Cliff Hagan, Ralph Hacker, Jim Host, Billy Reed, Adolph Rupp, and Cawood Ledford, this engaging biography showcases the life and work of a beloved broadcast talent and documents the rise of sports radio during the twentieth century.

The Meatshower is a new children's book by author Mick Sullivan that tells the true story of the day meat fell from the sky on March 3, 1876 in Bath County, Kentucky. (Really, it happened.) The story is told by a piece of the very old meat who now sits in a lonely jar on a museum shelf. He reflects on his humble beginnings and speculates about all the possibilities of how he came to be. Just how and why did chunks of meat rain from the sky 150 years ago? The Meatshower by Mick Sullivan has all the answers. We promise this will be the weirdest, craziest, and meatiest book you'll read with your kids this year. It's just one of the bizarre stories Mick covers on his award-winning children's podcast, The Past and The Curious, which covers bizarre phenomenon from throughout the insane history of the world.

Fiction; 217 pages.

Fiction; 275 pages.

Fiction; 274 pages.

Fiction, 259 pages.

"The late Hollis Summers was a widely admired writer of fiction, and these two novellas, unpublished at his death, make abundantly clear the reasons for that admiration."--BOOK JACKET. In Helen, Ben Adams has retreated to his lakeside cabin to write; in The Girls, Archie Lee Baxter, a contented bookstore owner moves with his wife from a small town in Kentucky to Houston.

Fiction; short stories. Twelve contemporary tales probe the psyche and emotions of people trapped by forebodings of physical or spiritual death.

Fiction; short stories; 104 pages.

"A novel"; 275 pages.

Poems; 48 pages.

Poems; [17] pages.

Poems; 85 pages.

Poetry; 65 pages. Ordinary, everday, homely. These are words that come to mind to describe the dimension Hollis Summers' poems live in. But they are inadequate words, and his are deceptively simple poems. They speak little, and quietly, but they record, in the silences they create, a desperate, melancholy magic about the surfaces and trivial events of our days. So we are led to discover, and assent, to all these tonal perceptions as the true domestic furniture of our inner lives. And though the poems see -- feel -- the transformation happening in us and about us, the flat surface of the moment is never lost, or lost sight of: as in "Maybe Nobody Wants to Appear" -- In our town we Double park in Christmas week Waiting for each other. And we have been known, At Christmas, to understand snow In southeastern Ohio. It is all reported in an insistently matter-of-fact tone: beautiful and mysterious moments we cannot translate into any meaning, a sense of urgency and incipent despair in all our acts and words, a daily normality of madness: For five days after the boy's death I used him for a dust mop. I am accustomed to helping my wife Around the house. We have a large house and many Children. Also there is fear. We fear the loss -- and gain -- of words in these poems. And Summers respects the fear too much to try to undercut it with any arch irony. The voice that speaks these poems does have irony in it, but it is only lightly- and sorrowfully-touched by it, as if by a faint wash of blue. It is too diffident to be used as a shield against its own truth-like the poems themselves. Quiet, unpretentious, seemingly uncertain, they make their certain visits.

Poems; 86 pages.

Poems, 81 pages.

Poems; 88 pages.

Children's poetry; 39 pages.

Poems; 56 pages.

Poems; 72 pages.

With an introduction by Wade Hall, Morris Grubbs has sifted through vintage classics, little-known gems, and stunning debuts to assemble this collection of forty stories by popular and critically acclaimed writers. In subtle and profound ways they challenge and overturn accepted stereotypes about the land their authors call home, whether by birth or by choice. Kentucky writers have produced some of the finest short stories published in the last fifty years, much of which focuses on the tension between the comforts of community and the siren-like lure of the outside world. Arranged chronologically, from Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter" to Crystal E. Wilkinson's "Humming Back Yesterday," these stories are linked by their juxtaposition of departures and returns, the familiar and the unknown, home and beyond. Contributors: Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, James Still, Jane Mayhall, Elizabeth Hardwick, Dean Cadle, Jesse Stuart, Billy C. Clark, Janice Holt Giles, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Hollis Summers, Ed McClanahan, Sallie Bingham, Robert Hazel, Jack Cady, Jim Wayne Miller, David Madden, Gayl Jones, Jane Stuart, Gurney Norman, Walter Tevis, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joe Ashby Porter, Leon V. Driskell, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, Richard Cortez Day, Sena Jeter Naslund, Pat Carr, Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Lisa Koger, Barbara Kingsolver, Normandi Ellis, Guy Davenport, Kim Edwards, Chris Holbrook, Paul Griner, Chris Offutt, Dwight Allen, Crystal E. Wilkinson. Edited by Morris Allen Grubbs; with an introduction by Wade Hall and an afterword by Charles E. May.

Named persons: J. D. Salinger; James Joyce; Frank O'Connor; Anton Pavlovich Chekhov; Ernest Hemingway; Edgar Allan Poe; Bret Harte; Randall Jarrell; Katherine Mansfield; D. H. Lawrence

Ficton; short stories. Contents: King Solomon of Kentucky / James Lane Allen -- An Experience on the Dress Line / Lucky Furman -- Courtin' on Cutshin / John Fox Jr. -- Hoodooed / Alice Hegan Rice -- Snake Doctor / Irvin S. Cobb -- Children of Noah / Ben Lucien Burman -- The Sacrifice of the Maidens / Elizabeth Madox Roberts -- Old Red / Caroline Gordon -- The Immortal Woman / Allen Tate -- Room in the World / Leane Zugsmith -- Dawn of Remembered Spring / Jesse Stuart -- Mrs. Razor / James Still -- Blackberry Winter / Robert Penn Warren -- Evenings at Home / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Ebbie / A.B. Guthrie Jr.

Anthology; 706 pages.

Archival material; housed at Ohio University. Summary, "The Hollis Summers Papers contains correspondence, manuscripts, clippings and tear sheets, anthologies, journals, and other publications, miscellaneous personal and business documents (e.g., book contracts, vitae, bibliographies), and a draft manuscript entitled "Family Sayings.""

"Chosen by Rachel Hadas as the winner of the 1995 Arkansas Poetry Award, Anne & Alpheus: 1842-1882 is a compelling duet of monologues between a frontier man and woman surviving the hardships and recording the small triumphs of life in rural nineteenth-century Kentucky." "Ambitious in breadth and scope, these poems chart the loves and losses of early marriage, the terrors of civilian life during the Civil War, and the universal sorrows of aging, loneliness, and death. Through the distinct voices of Anne and Alpheus Waters, Joe Survant has fashioned a collection with all the sweep of a novel, all the dramatic intensity, poem by poem, of short fiction, and all the earthy, human lyricism of the dramatic monologue. These poems take us into the tobacco sheds, put us behind the plow, let us smell the soil, and carry us under the stars where Anne and Alpheus walked."--Book Jacket. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Weaving together universal themes of family, geography, and death with images of America's frontier landscape, former Kentucky Poet Laureate Joe Survant has been lauded for his ability to capture the spirit of the land and its people. Kliatt magazine has praised his work, stating, "Survant's words sing.... This is storytelling at its best." Exploring the pre-Columbian and frontier history of the commonwealth, The Land We Dreamed is the final installment in the poet's trilogy on rural Kentucky. The poems in the book feature several well-known figures and their stories, reimagining Dr. Thomas Walker's naming of the Cumberland Plateau, Mary Draper Ingles's treacherous journey from Big Bone Lick to western Virginia following her abduction by Native Americans, and Daniel Boone's ruminations on the fall season of 1770. Survant also explores the Bluegrass from the perspectives of the chiefs of the Shawnee and Seneca tribes. Drawing on primary documents such as the seventeenth-century reports of French Jesuit missionaries, excerpts from the Draper manuscripts, and the journals of pioneers George Croghan and Christopher Gist, this collection surveys a broad and under-recorded history. Poem by poem, Survant takes readers on an imaginative expedition -- through unspoiled Shawnee cornfields, down the wild Ohio River, and into the depths of the region's ancient coal seams.

Poems; 46 pages.

"Rafting Rise is a terrific book, the richly detailed evocation of an entire world, and an important contribution to the literature of the rural South."--Ted Kooser "Rafting Rise has the strength of extended narrative and the quickness of lyric poetry. There is a haunting, visionary quality to Joe Survant's dramatic poem, bringing to life a world of log rafting and floodplain dwellers along the Rough and Green Rivers in 1916 and 1917. The sections are snapshots and ballads of witness, a counterpoint of voices that open a window on this long-ago time and place, of giant catfish and spells, logjams and river witch. The phrases shine and the lines sing out, and the dead come back and speak again, as the real enters the realm of legend."--Robert Morgan "Joe Survant writes about turn-of-the-century backwoods America with an uncanny sense of firsthand knowledge. He knows whereof he writes, and he writes with an authority that derives from a deep-seated respect for the lives of river folk and trappers and the lone inhabitants of 'womenless shacks.' And for all the harsh realities of a life hacked out of such rough terrain, Mr. Survant never overlooks the beauty of 'sycamores grazing by the creek,' wild grapes growing in the river bottoms, or a thicket lit by trumpet weed. To read this book is to enter a world, and to follow its narrative is to be carried on the current of a deeply compelling adventure."--Sherod Santos Set in the central Kentucky basins of the Rough, Green, and Ohio Rivers in 1916-17, Rafting Rise joins the storytelling virtues of fiction with the intensity of the poetic lyric to reach a wider audience, including readers of poetry, lovers of good tales, and those interested in the small events of history recreated through the lives of carefully imagined characters. The book's central action is the rafting of logs in winter down the rivers to the lumber mills in Evansville, Indiana. Survant re-creates the whole fabric of the hardscrabble society that lives by this perilous trade. They are tough people, such as Carl Peters, stranded on a raft run aground in a freezing rain, walking in a figure eight all night to stay alive while his fellow rafter Tom Simpson, who didn't make it, ". . . lay/like frozen wood/in the bottom of our boat." Elsewhere, in love poems and poems celebrating the lush riverine landscape, Survant conveys the simple, sensuous moments that punctuate this hard life. Here is Bill Balcom at a camp meeting, eighteen and chafing for adventure on the river: "When I took/a piece of Susie's buttermilk pie,/I saw her looking,/and when I ate/I imagined/ her taste." But none of the characters is more vivid than Sallie, the female protagonist, a half-mad medicine woman living with her dogs in whatever shelter she can find. Survant gives Sallie such a deep empathy with the countryside and its creatures that she becomes the spirit of the place. But Sallie pays dearly for her empathy with nature, hearing voices over which she has no power. Worse, she has the curse of prophecy, can see the hand of death before it strikes, and is as much feared as needed by the community. Through these and a handful of other characters, Survant fashions a verse epic of Kentucky on the eve of the entry of the United States into World War I. This volume continues the experiment begun in his earlier Anne & Alpheus, combining poetry and narrative to tell the story of several generations connected by place and memory across the artificial boundaries of time.

Poems; 28 pages.

"The publication of Abraham Lincoln of Kentucky is a project of the Kentucky Arts Council made possible through an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts."--Title page verso.
"This book was handset in Garamond type designed by Morris Benton for ATF after the work of Jean Jannon, a master printer in seventeenth century Paris. 500 copies were printed on Mohawk Superfine paper on a hand-fed C & P and handbound. The engravings were printed from the wood. Design, composition, printing and binding by Leslie Shane and Gray Zeitz at Larkspur Press." --from paperback edition.

In 2008, the Kentucky Arts Council published Five Kentucky Poets Laureate: An Anthology, a collection of poetry and prose by the commonwealth's poets laureate. The anthology includes the writings of Richard Taylor (Kentucky Poet Laureate 1999-2000), James Baker Hall (2001-2002), Joe Survant (2003-2004), Sena Jeter Naslund (2005-2006), and Jane Gentry (2007-2008), and was edited by Jane Gentry and Frederick Smock with a cover illustration by photographer Geoff Carr.

Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Delaware.

What Comes Down To Us features twenty-five of Kentucky's most accomplished contemporary poets. Together they serve to illustrate the diversity and richness of poetry being written today in the Commonwealth. The poems were collected by Jeff Worley, a poet who has lived in Kentucky for more than two decades. Although the subject matter of the poems transcends the state's borders, the collection communicates a strong sense of Kentucky as a place. Worley's introduction places contemporary Kentucky poetry in the context of the state's rich literary tradition, and the poet biographies include their reflections and, often, their poetic approach and technique.

From the moment Daniel Boone first "gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and...beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below," generations of Kentuckians have developed rich and enduring relationships with the land that surrounds them. Of Woods & Waters: A Kentucky Outdoors Reader is filled with loving tributes, written across the Commonwealth's two centuries, offered in celebration of Kentucky's widely varied environmental wonders that nurture both life and art. Ron Ellis, an outdoors enthusiast and noted writer, has gathered art, fiction, personal essays and poetry from many of Kentucky's best-known authors for this comprehensive collection. The anthology begins with famed illustrator John James Audubon's eloquent account of extracting catfish from the Ohio River and progresses through over fifty contributions by both established and emerging writers. Covering two hundred years of hunting, fishing, camping, cooking, hiking, and canoeing in Kentucky's woods and waters, these classic and original works show how writers have, as celebrated Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark suggests, "fallen under the spell of the land." Of Woods & Waters does not merely recount fond memories. Many authors presented in this collection echo the sentiments of the award-winning novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver, who writes, "Much of what I know about life, and almost everything I believe about the way I want to live, was formed in those woods" adjacent to her birthplace in Nicholas County, Kentucky. The works collected in Of Woods & Waters serve to honor and defend what many recognize as a sadly declining way of life, one born out of genuine reverence for the beauty and bounty of nature. The contributions of Wendell Berry, Janice Holt Giles, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jesse Stuart, James Still, Robert Penn Warren, James Baker Hall, Silas House, and other esteemed authors examine the delicate balances that must be struck between humanity and nature, between progress and sustainable living. While raising these crucial questions, these writings center on connections among friends and family in Kentucky's beautiful natural surroundings. The authors spin tales of the whistling wings of ducks overhead, the heart-pounding excitement of a white-tailed buck's sudden appearance, the joy of childhood plunges into cold lake waters after hours of climbing trees, and the thrill of watching sons and daughters catch their first fish. In these writings, the bountiful Kentucky wilderness that first captivated frontier settlers remains vibrantly alive.

A history of Kentucky's poets laureate since 1926. Contains works by J.T. Cotton Noe, Edward Gay Hill, Louise Scott Phillips, Edwin Carlisle Litsey, Jesse Hilton Stuart, Lowell Allen Williams, Lillian D. Chaffin, Senator Tom Mobley, Agnes Todd Saffell O'Rear, Clarence "Soc" Henry Clay, Lee Pennington, Paul Salyers, Dale Faughn, Jim Wayne Miller, Henry E. Pilkenton, James H. Patton, James Still, Joy Bale Boone, Richard Lawrence Taylor, James Baker Hall and Joe Survant.

Poems; 71 pages. The poems in this humane collection are hard and beautiful. They are hard, because the locals here are marginalized and somewhat lost, yet beautiful because they live with hope, and because each poem in this heartfelt book is accompanied by singing. Behind this cast of characters is the poet himself, a living spirit, capturing the human voice, swinging back and forth like the symbol evoked by the title of this honest and necessary collection. This is at once a portrait and a vision rendered into lines, notation for a place and time and the saintly people there. It is a gift to be in such able hands, and a further gift to turn the pages of their labor. Three cheers for this delight -Maurice Manning

Poems; 74 pages. "There are a few books of poetry that can change, if not your life, your way of living on this earth, make you more aware of and more grateful for what is sacred, more determined to protect what is left of that sacredness. This book is one of them. "The whole time," Eric writes, "I was in conversation with God." And I believe it. This is a holy book, full of love, rage, and hope." --Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

"Poems that explore the effects of years of war on the American psyche and the power of hope, action and spirituality to help us cope" - Summary from the author's website

Poems; 162 pages.

Poems, 177 pages.

Poems; 269 pages.

Wondrous Things is a children's picture book and interactive coloring book in one. Set in one continuous landscape printed on accordion-style pages, the message of the book is simple: we all have gifts and talents to share with the world. By flipping the book over, readers discover the same landscape with space to draw and express their own ideas and vision of how a new story might unfold.

"Most people who grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky have heard of the so-called Murder Mansion on Cemetery Road. However, many people don't know the reason it was given that macabre title so many years ago. The Cemetery Road Murders is the true story about the seventy-year old murders, the real cast of characters involved, and the courtroom dramas that followed"--Publisher's website