Browse A-Z Authors: Gn-Gq

In 1925 Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965) founded the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS), a public health organization in eastern Kentucky providing nurses on horseback to reach families who otherwise would not receive health care. Through this public health organization, she introduced nurse-midwifery to the United States and created a highly successful, cost-effective model for rural health care delivery that has been replicated throughout the world. In this first comprehensive biography of the FNS founder, Melanie Beals Goan provides a revealing look at the challenges Breckinridge faced as she sought reform and the contradictions she embodied. Goan explores Breckinridge's perspective on gender roles, her charisma, her sense of obligation to live a life of service, her eccentricity, her religiosity, and her application of professionalized, science-based health care ideas. Highly intelligent and creative, Breckinridge also suffered from depression, was by modern standards racist, and fought progress as she aged--sometimes to the detriment of those she served. Breckinridge optimistically believed that she could change the world by providing health care to women and children. She ultimately changed just one corner of the world, but her experience continues to provide powerful lessons about the possibilities and the limitations of reform.

When the Declaration of Independence was signed by a group of wealthy white men in 1776, poor white men, African Americans, and women quickly discovered that the unalienable rights it promised were not truly for all. The Nineteenth Amendment eventually gave women the right to vote in 1920, but the change was not welcomed by people of all genders in politically and religiously conservative Kentucky. As a result, the suffrage movement in the Commonwealth involved a tangled web of stakeholders, entrenched interest groups, unyielding constitutional barriers, and activists with competing strategies. In A Simple Justice, Melanie Beals Goan offers a new and deeper understanding of the women's suffrage movement in Kentucky by following the people who labored long and hard to see the battle won. Women's suffrage was not simply a question of whether women could and should vote; it carried more serious implications for white supremacy and for the balance of federal and state powers -- especially in a border state. Shocking racial hostility surfaced even as activists attempted to make America more equitable. Goan looks beyond iconic women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to reveal figures whose names have been lost to history. Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge led the Kentucky movement, but they did not do it alone. This timely study introduces readers to individuals across the Bluegrass State who did their part to move the nation closer to achieving its founding ideals.

Join Ruby who learns about Willa Brown and her love for aviation and struggles for equal rights. Willa was a true pioneer who broke barriers to become the first licensed female pilot in the country. She fought for the rights of young black pilots to serve their country as a part of the Army Air Corps during World War II. These fine young men, under Willa's training, became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

A Girl and Her Cows is about a little girl visiting her grandparents farm who goes exploring in the barn to meet three talking cows who are excited to meet her. They admire how she dresses. They tell her how they have secretly wanted to wear shoes, earrings, and even lipstick. As the little girl goes about helping them to have those things, their friendship grows. After a day of walking around the farm in their new things, the cows soon learn that the things they wanted didn't work out like they thought they would and returned the shoes, earrings, and necklaces. Fearing that the little girl would no longer be their friend, they apologized for not being able to wear the fancy things she had given them. The little girl explained to them that true friends like you just the way you are and that you don't need fancy shoes or anything else to be friends.

"A Kentucky Family Reunion" is glimpse into a typical family reunion. Families pile into shiny new cars, mini-vans, and rusty old pickup trucks to travel over the hills and hollers of Kentucky to come together on their special day each year to celebrate family and share the wonderful food that represents who we are and where we're from

The Little Red Hen Hatches a Plan is a new look at a well-loved classic. Red forms a company titled "Red's Bread" and hires help to grow the wheat, make the bread, and take it to market. Everyone shares in the profit, proving that team work pays off!

When Peg's pie truck rolls into town, excitement and good cheer fill the warm spring air as neighbors gather to order a pie and visit with each other after the long cold winter. As the line stretches around the corner, they are brought together by the delicious aroma of baking pies. What kind of pie will each of them order?

The Secret Life of Sam the Soccer Ball is about a lonely soccer ball who is finally bought by a little boy named Dylan who takes him home where their adventures begin. Sam shares his life with us on the soccer field as he is kicked, rolled and bounced through the years as he and Dylan both get older.

"What Happened to Nana's Hair?" is a whimsical look at how children view their grandmother's experiences with cancer and their efforts to help her deal with being bald. Nana helps them cope with their initial shock of seeing her bald for the first time while they remind her that she is still their beloved Nana, no matter how she looks!

"What Kind of Dog Are You?" is the story of Becca who very much wants a dog, but can't have one because she lives in a very small house with a very small yard and no room for a dog. She tries to be content by keeping a journal of all the dogs she meets, dreaming of having a dog of her own until one day. . .

Fiction; 287 pages. This sporting novel looks into the complicated heart and soul of a passionately devoted outsdoorsman. Aleck Maury is a teacher and scholar whose pursuit of sport comes at the expense of his career, and often, his family. Maury elevates the techniques of shooting and angling into an art form. First published in 1934.

Journal.

Fiction; short stories; 352 pages. A compilation of all the short fiction of a career spanning over forty years includes such classics as The Captive and Old Red and such previously uncollected works as The Olive Garden and The Waterfall.

Fiction; short stories; 245 pages. The short story, "The captive", is a fictionalized account of Jenny Wiley's Indian captivity.

Fiction; 299 pages. First published in 1937.

Fiction; 398 pages.

Fiction; 469 pages. This tragic novel traces the barbarization of the white settlers of the Appalachian frontier, culminating in the destruction of the Cherokee nation and the moral corruption of its conquerors. Southern Classics Series. First published in 1941.

Fiction; short stories; 469 pages, second edition. "This book differs from other short story anthologies in that it is based on the assumption that fiction is an art closely allied to painting and that, as in painting, there are certain 'constants' or secrets of technique which not only appear in the works of all masters of the craft but which have been handed down from master to master throughout the ages."--Preface.

Fiction; 312 pages. "Tom and Vera Claiborne have settled at Blencker's Bridge with a motley assortment of friends, family, and literati. Despite life at Blencker's Bridge being 'a party every day,' a deepening sense of disaffection develops among its inhabitants: Tom, frustrated by his poetic impotency, takes a mistress; his cousin and his wife offer psychiatric theories and treatments; and Vera throws herself into farming and animal husbandry--all seeking to find what once was lost"--Cover, page 4.

Fiction; 378 pages. A study of the hero in his archetypal struggle against death, this novel follows the Civil War in the West through the career of Confederate Rivers Allard, a Kentuckian who rides with Forrest. Southern Classics Series. First published in 1937.

Fiction; short stories; 256 pages. First published in 1963.

Fiction; 282 pages. First published in 1931.

Fiction; 303 pages. Reprint of the 1951 ed. published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.

Fiction; 316 pages. First published in 1944.

A visiting tour of master craftsmen from Sophocles to Hemingway, in which a practicing novelist discusses the form and history of the novel, the importance of scene and accessory, the problem of viewpoint, and the characteristics of the perfect reader.

Chapbook; 31 pages. With a select bibliography of works by and about Ford Madox Ford by Helmut E. Gerber.

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.

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.

How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon re-imagined and reconstructed the Native American past in their work. In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have Native Americans played an active role in the construction of the South's cultural landscape--despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them invisible--but that their under-examined presence in southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a post-regional understanding of the American South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the Mississippi Territory, and the slave-holding societies of the American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently returned to the idea of an "Indian frontier," each articulating a different vision and discourse about Native Americans--wholesome and pure in the vision of some, symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others. Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional identity by invoking the South's "native" heritage and pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the "Indian" signifies regional and national self-definitions and contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national "others." Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses: quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs into the textual strata of America's literature and its cultural history).

Biography, 48 pages. Caroline Gordon - American Writers 59 was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Criticism and Interpretation; 392 pages.

Biography and criticism; 159 pages. Presents the life and works of Southern novelist and short story writer Caroline Gordon. Includes a chronology.

Biography; 416 pages, illustrations. Includes index.

This girl is a real novelist," wrote Caroline Gordon about Flannery O'Connor upon being asked to review a manuscript of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood. "She is already a rare phenomenon: a Catholic novelist with a real dramatic sense, one who relies more on her technique than her piety." This collection of letters and other documents offers the most complete portrait of the relationship between two of the American South's most acclaimed twentieth-century writers: Flannery O'Connor and Caroline Gordon. Gordon (1895-1981) had herself been a protégée of an important novelist, Ford Madox Ford, before publishing nine novels and three short story collections of her own, most notably, The Forest of the South and Old Red and Other Stories, and she would offer insights and friendship to O'Connor during almost all of O'Connor's career. As revealed in this collection of correspondence, Gordon's thirteen-year friendship with O'Connor (1925-64) and the critiques of O'Connor's fiction that she wrote during this time not only fostered each writer's career but occasioned a remarkable series of letters full of insights about the craft of writing. Gordon, a more established writer at the start of their correspondence, acted as a mentor to the younger O'Connor and their letters reveal Gordon's strong hand in shaping some of O'Connor's most acclaimed work, including Wise Blood, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and "The Displaced Person.

Bad Daughter explores misbehavior--its risky pleasures and often tragic consequences--through poems about "bad" daughters, sisters, and their mothers. What happens to the sister who obeys? What if a daughter refuses her inheritance? Can she? What sanctuary and what limits do worship and domesticity provide? Gorham adopts several lyric forms--'morality tales,' ironic prayers, scaled-down sonnets, sharp meditations on concepts such as envy, detachment, and immortality--to show that the self as forged by generations of women and girls is both subversive and enduring.

In The Cure, Sarah Gorham's mature, eager, intelligent poetic voice explores family--and marriage; and self--as forms in which we move, escaping and demanding restraint, seeking and fearing contact with each other. The book moves toward and away from a riveting sequence, "The Family Afterward," that examines the intrusions and heartbreaks, complicities and narrowings of definition, that are forced upon the family members of an alcoholic. Gorham is interested in appetite: for drink, for sex, for oblivion, for comfort. The paradoxes she most thrillingly defines are the tightest ones, degrees and atmospheres apart. The Cure is both accessible and intimate; sometimes funny, sometimes desolate. Gorham describes a hike, the hiker coming upon a limestone cross, surrounded by the tchotchke-mementos of previous passers-by. She is flooded, but trusts the surprise of her emotion: "Very moving these rookie prayers/ This unmajestic gratitude." It's that delectable sensibility, the pause that yields finely tuned appreciation, that marks Gorham's vision, her cupped ear listening to the world.

Poems; 51 pages.

Groundbreaking anthology of poetry on substance abuse and recovery.

Poetry; 73 pages.

"Co-winner of the Four Way Books Award series in poetry selected by Heather McHugh."--Cover.

Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleys-so, too, the languages she's obliged to learn: one ruffian, the other militaristic. Though her stay lasted a mere two years, her time there was so crucial in her transition to adulthood that she returns to those years decades later, each and every night in memory and dream. There are brief forays into the science of surviving an avalanche; Sherlock Holmes's faked demise at the Reichenbach Falls; the origins of meringue; and the history of homesickness and its spiritual twin, Sehnsucht. In her travels Gorham tracks an adolescent experience both agonizingly familiar and curiously exotic.

Study in Perfect is an exploration of perfection. In "Moving Horizontal" a Victorian house loses its charm over time, especially when compared to a modernist contemporary filled with light. Family life is dense with pleasure, as in the perfect vacation described in "Marking Time in Door County," and in "Neriage, or What Is the Secret of a Long Marriage," where an ancient Japanese ceramic technique has much in common with shaping a close relationship. There is such a thing as a perfect cup of tea, depending on who is preparing and drinking it ("Perfect Tea"). And schmaltzy show tunes flowing from a black-lacquered piano in a Chinese restaurant can be genuinely moving ("Sentimental à la Carte"). Naturally, Gorham must embrace imperfection. The poisonous mushrooms in "Darling Amanita" lead to a consideration of our darker impulses, like obsessive love, even murder. And there is pain: "The Shape of Fear" relates the story of a child stricken with a deadly staph infection, as it considers the function and form of fear. And alcoholism, the family disease no one wants to talk about, is poised against The Cat in the Hat, a story everyone has read and enjoyed. Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection's exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste. First published in 2014.

Sound recording. Eight Kentucky writers read from their own works; previously recorded as part of the Kentucky Center for the Arts' Readings series beginning in 1988. Named persons: James Still; Marsha Norman; Jim Wayne Miller; Sena Jeter Naslund; Sarah Gorham; Jeffrey Skinner; Maureen Podshadley Morehead; Fenton Johnson.
7 audiocassettes.

First published in 1999. In this sequel to Conversations with Kentucky Writers, L. Elisabeth Beattie brings together in-depth interviews with sixteen of the state's premiere wordsmiths. This new volume offers the perspectives of poets, journalists, and scholars as they discuss their views on creativity, the teaching of writing, and the importance of Kentucky in their work. They talk frankly about how and why they do what they do. The writers speak for themselves, and their thoughts come alive on the page. Beattie's interviews reveal the allegiances and alliances among Kentucky writers that have shaped literary trends by bringing together people with shared interests, values, subjects, and styles. The interviewees include authors who are captivated in other writers and in what they have to say about the process and craft of writing; educators who are interested in Kentucky writers and what their work reveals about the nature of creativity; and historians who are concerned with Kentucky's literary and cultural heritage. The interviews reveal patterns in Kentucky literature from mid-century to the millennium, as authors talk about how their sense of place has changed over the decades and reveal the ways in which the roots of Kentucky writing have produced a literary flowering at the century's end. Includes: Sallie Bingham, Joy Bale Boone, Thomas D. Clark, John Egerton, Sarah Gorham, Lynwood Montell, Maureen Morehead, John Ed Pearce, Ameilia Blossom Pegram, Karen Robards, Jeffrey Skinner, Frederick Smock, Frank Steele, Martha Bennett Stiles, Richard Taylor, and Michael Williams.