Tom Eblen
George Ella Lyon is a multitalented author whose work is deeply rooted in her native Harlan County. Loyal Jones also is an Appalachian, and his writing, teaching and activism have made an enormous contribution to scholarship about the region’s culture. James C. Klotter, who grew up in Owsley County, is a prolific author and has been Kentucky’s official state historian for more than four decades.
These three authors and two deceased writers—pioneering Black journalist Ted Poston and poet Robert Hazel—soon will join 50 other living and deceased writers in the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. An induction ceremony is planned March 24 at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington.
The Hall of Fame was created by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in 2012 to recognize outstanding writers with strong ties to Kentucky. Members are chosen by committees at the Carnegie Center and the Kentucky Arts Council that include some of the state’s most accomplished writers.
Learn more about these Kentucky literary icons in this special section. These articles were written by Tom Eblen, a former Lexington Herald-Leader columnist and managing editor who is the Carnegie Center’s literary arts liaison.
George Ella Lyon
George Ella Lyon has written something for just about every kind of reader. In a career spanning nearly four decades, she has published two novels, 10 poetry collections, six novels for young people, and 34 children’s picture books, plus stories, songs, plays, scripts and memoirs that, like the writer herself, defy categories.
She is a poet, writer, teacher, musician, storyteller and social activist with Appalachian roots and a global reach. “Where I’m From,” her 1993 poem about personal identity, has become a classroom classic, statewide and national arts projects, and a writing prompt used by teachers around the world.
So, what is her advice for other writers and would-be writers?
“Writing, first of all, is for you,” she said in an interview. “It’s really a tool for understanding yourself and helping yourself. Your voice matters. You have stories to tell that nobody else could tell. You look at the world in a way that no one has ever looked at it before.”
That certainly has been true for Lyon, who will be inducted March 24 into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame along with two other living writers—Kentucky historian James C. Klotter and Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones—and two deceased writers, pioneering journalist Ted Poston and poet and teacher Robert Hazel.
Appalachian Roots
She was born George Ella Hoskins on April 25, 1949, in the southeastern Kentucky coal mining town of Harlan. Her father, Robert, was a dry cleaner who read poems aloud and sang to her. Her mother, Gladys, loved to play imagination games with her. “Mother named me after her brother George and her sister Ella,” she said, explaining her unusual name. “If she’d taken their middle names, I would be Benjamin May.”
Lyon’s parents were in the first generation of their families to go to college. When her father’s father, a homebuilder, built their home in Harlan, her parents insisted he include a library with built-in bookshelves. “That room expressed the center of the family,” she said.
When she was in sixth grade, Lyon’s only sibling, her brother Robert, left Harlan for Yale University. He is now retired after a career as an English professor at James Madison University in Virginia.
Lyon started writing poems in third grade, but the main creative outlet of her youth was music. She first played piano and flute. But by eighth grade, when she started hearing folk songs on the radio, she traded her flute and $10 for a guitar. She subscribed to, and then wrote for, Sing Out! magazine, the bible of the folk music revival of that era.
“What I wanted to do was go to Greenwich Village and be a folk singer. That was my plan,” she said. “My folks didn’t think that was such a hot idea.”
Instead of New York, she went to Danville, earning a bachelor’s degree from Centre College in 1971. Next stop was the University of Arkansas for a master’s degree and then to Indiana University, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1978. She married musician and writer Stephen Lyon in 1972. They have two sons—Benn, 45, and Joey, 35—and a granddaughter, Mina, 4.
‘Close to the Wonder’
Lyon has taught creative writing at five colleges and universities, but most of her income has come from publishing and—until the COVID-19 pandemic—visiting schools, where she reads to, sings with, and inspires children.
“When I speak to kids, I hope there is joy in that experience and they see possibilities in themselves and in the world that maybe they didn’t see before, and they get listened to when they ask a question,” she said. “I just love being that close to the wonder.
“But I’ve also seen some very hard things in those school visits—children you don’t forget. And some fabulous teachers, who, as we know, are often the most stable adult in a child’s life.”
For the past 35 years, Lyon has spent much of her time each day in a tiny sun-splashed writing studio on the second floor of her home in Lexington’s Gardenside neighborhood. She mostly writes by hand at a stand-up desk but reaches for her laptop computer when she wants to write outside or with her eyes shut.
“I write in part for the same reason I read, which is to be in a larger world beyond myself,” she said. “And then, sometimes, somebody reads it and it really means something to them, and that’s huge. It’s huge to think something you wrote has touched someone the way things other people wrote have touched you.”
Lyon’s list of honors and awards is almost as long as her list of books. When asked what other writers have influenced her, Lyon names an array of influences ranging from James Still and Robert Gipe to Nikky Finney and Pete Seeger. At the top of the list, though, is Virginia Woolf. “I consider her my word mother in many ways,” she said.
Lyon said she also has been influenced by her sons and husband Steve. “The range of his creativity and his humor,” she said. “Just being married to another artist, that’s a huge thing. You respect what it requires in each other.”
Finding Community
Lyon said it took her a while to become comfortable writing as an Appalachian—and a woman—after her education in classic literature, which skews heavily toward affluent white male writers. But once she did, “the world both magnified and came closer because I could listen for my own voice as opposed to having a ‘poetry voice,’ ” she said. It also has given her a community, something she values more with each passing year: “I’ve been really lucky to have a community of Appalachian writers and readers.”
After graduate school, Lyon focused on poetry, publishing her first collection, Mountain, in 1983. But she said her most fortunate break came the next year, when the late Richard Jackson, who would become her longtime editor, encouraged her to write books for children. Her first picture book, Father Time and the Day Boxes, illustrated by Robert Andrew Parker, grew out of a conversation she had with her then-young son, Benn.
“I was just so lucky,” she said of getting started writing picture books. She enjoys collaborating with illustrators, and she loves how young readers embrace stories. “Only kindergarteners get so excited about what you’re reading that they fall out of their chair. I’ve never had an adult do that! Children are so new, and they ask the deepest questions, and they say extraordinary things.”
Social justice has been central to Lyon’s writing and activism. Part of that came, she said, from growing up in Harlan County, a place of great wealth and great poverty. She also thinks it is a result of coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the civil rights, peace and environmental movements were in full flower.
When Lyon was Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, from 2015-17, the Kentucky Arts Council helped her turn the “Where I’m From” poem into a statewide poetry participation project that drew 731 submissions from 83 counties.
Then, Lyon and Julie Landsman, a Minneapolis-based writer and educator, transformed it into an online project (iamfromproject.com) that has received submissions of poetry, photos, audio, video and other artistic expressions from people across the country. The goal was to create more appreciation for America’s rich diversity and to combat what Lyon called “the fear- and hate-mongering alive in our country today.”
Lyon said she doesn’t try to preach in her writing, especially in her children’s books, but she said, “I hope if kids are moved by the story, then the concerns of the story may also reach them.”
Taking Risks with Writing
A writing career as varied and prolific as Lyon’s requires risk-taking—writing for others but also for herself.
The boldest example may be her most recent poetry collection, Back to the Light, published in April 2021 by the University Press of Kentucky. In poems that trace her life’s path from childhood to the present, she reveals much, including that she was sexually assaulted at age 5 by an older boy, a family friend, but her mother didn’t believe her.
“It’s partly having a granddaughter and wanting not only to have her be safe in the world but wanting me to be clearer so I’m not hiding something,” she said of the decision to publish that poem, which she titled “Out with It.”
“The stories that aren’t told have a huge impact on us, just like the people who are missing in our family have a huge impact on us,” she said. “It’s a healing, and it’s an acceptance. I’ve had people say to me that that book really helped them. So, gee, what a thing is that!”
Lyon’s daily writing practice often begins with her journal. She has been keeping journals for decades, and they fill several of the shelves that line the walls of her upstairs writing room. Journal entries often become writing projects—sometimes years later, because she likes to go back through and read her old journals.
“There’s the experience of visiting yourself earlier but also recognizing things that were ahead of you,” she said. “So, in a way, those journals are like shelves of things you grew and canned; they’re food for the future. That’s not something I knew was going to be true, but it is.”
Lyon said she tends to write more from feelings than ideas. And after all these years, writing has not lost its magic for her.
“It’s a powerful tool,” she said. “I love the fact that, when it’s working, it’s always new, and there’s always a lot to learn. My very favorite moment is when I realize it’s got something I couldn’t give it. It becomes enlivened; we’re collaborating as opposed to me putting words on the paper. I don’t know if that’s what they call ‘in the zone’ or flow.
“I never know where it’s going, except down the page. But it’s a wonderful thing to be in the presence of something that wants to be, and be a part of creation that’s ongoing, and we all tap into in some way or another.”
James Christopher Klotter
James Christopher Klotter is an award-winning author who has spent his career researching and interpreting Kentucky history. Since 1980, he has served as the State Historian of Kentucky.
“With the possible exception of Thomas D. Clark, Jim probably knows more about the Commonwealth than anyone else in our history,” said Kentucky Monthly’s Bill Ellis, a fellow Kentucky historian and author who is retired from Eastern Kentucky University.
Klotter was born Jan. 17, 1947, in Lexington to Marjorie Gibson and John C. Klotter, who was later a dean at the University of Louisville. His parents divorced when he was young, and Klotter grew up mostly in Owsley County. He was educated at the University of Kentucky, earning his Ph.D. in 1975. He was a U.S. Army officer from 1970-71.
“As a young child, I had traveled to many Kentucky sites with my father and had always found them fascinating,” Klotter said.
But he didn’t start taking Kentucky history seriously until graduate school, when mentor Holman Hamilton got him interested in the Breckinridge family. “That dissertation required me to study the state’s history over a two-century timeframe, which awoke in me a fascination with the state’s past—and its future,” Klotter said.
Klotter is the author of 12 books, including The Breckinridges of Kentucky, 1760-1981 (University Press of Kentucky, 1986), and more than 60 articles. He wrote chapters for six other books, edited 11 more books, and has given almost 1,000 talks about Kentucky history across the state.
“Research is usually fun, as you read other people’s mail or old newspapers or recent interviews and the like,” he said. “Writing is a solitary action, and it can be hard at times. But there is a special joy when you craft a well-written sentence, when you understand your subject and can explain that revelation to the reader, when you realize that you are creating a special story that no one else can do.
“In fiction, you are limited by your imagination; in nonfiction historical writing, you are limited by your sources. How frustrating it can be to feel you know something important about your subject, but you cannot find the sources to prove it. But there is a real excitement when you do find missing pieces to the puzzle, when you are operating as the historian as detective, when you find answers no one else has discovered.”
Klotter said he is especially proud of two books: Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Kentucky Justice, Southern Humor, and American Manhood: Understanding the Life and Death of Richard Reid (LSU Press, 2003).
The Clay book “encompasses such an imposing national subject, over such a long time period, and covered a timeframe where I had not worked in much previously,” he said. “The other favorite is almost the reverse. [It] explores the life and death of an almost forgotten man, but in a short book looks at him in special depth and is, I think, well-written and even shocking.”
Klotter went to work for the Kentucky Historical Society in 1973 and was its executive director from 1990 until 1998. In 1991, he initiated a campaign to fund the construction of the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort. He then served as a history professor at Georgetown College from 1998 until his retirement in 2018.
He has been a leader in many historical organizations, including the Filson Historical Society, the Kentucky Oral History Commission, the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable.
He has been married since 1966 to Freda Campbell Klotter, whom he met when he was 5. She was his co-author on two Kentucky history textbooks. They have two daughters, a son, and seven grandchildren.
Klotter has received many awards, including the University of Kentucky Medallion for Intellectual Achievement (2016), the Carl West Literary Award from the Kentucky Book Festival (2021), and the Governor’s Outstanding Kentuckian Award (1998). He holds honorary degrees from Eastern Kentucky University and Union College.
Loyal Jones
Loyal Jones is a prolific writer and scholar of Appalachian culture who has been a friend and mentor to many other writers and scholars of the region. He is the author or co-author of 13 books and dozens of articles.
Jones was born Jan. 5, 1928, in Marble, North Carolina, one of eight children in a farming family. When he was 12, the family moved to Brasstown, North Carolina, where the John C. Campbell Folk School had been created in 1925. After high school, Jones served briefly in the U.S. Navy, then farmed and trained show horses for several years.
A woman associated with the folk school suggested to Jones that he enroll in Berea College. Both institutions had good libraries, fueling his interest in reading, writing and learning more about his native region. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Berea and a master’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina.
Before returning to Berea College to teach, Jones taught in the U.S. Army and Jefferson County public schools. He was associate executive director and later executive director of the Council of the Southern Mountains. Jones founded and led Berea College’s Appalachian Center from 1970 until 1993. Berea College’s trustees voted in 2008 to name the center for him.
“I tried to write about what I thought the real values of the Appalachian people were rather than the negative things, like moonshining and feuds,” Jones said. His favorite and most popular book is Appalachian Values (1995), with photographs by Warren Brunner. He and co-author Billy Ed Wheeler wrote five books about Appalachian humor.
“Loyal Jones, in many ways, deserves to be called the father of modern Appalachian studies,” said Ron Eller, a retired University of Kentucky history professor, author and leading historian of Appalachia. “Loyal represented a whole generation of mountain young people who discovered their Appalachian identity in the 1960s and 1970s and dedicated themselves to improving the region and celebrating mountain culture. In the manner of traditional mountain storytellers, Loyal was able to relate the dignity of mountain life and culture throughout his writings, lectures and many media appearances. As a scholar, he is widely respected today as a leading authority on Appalachian culture, humor and music.”
Bill Turner, a Harlan County native and scholar of Black history and culture in Appalachia, said Jones has been a longtime mentor and friend. “Loyal Jones picked me up more than four decades ago when I most needed advice, counsel, direction and instructions on how to frame my perspective, research, and writing on Appalachia, specifically Black people in the region,” Turner said. “My book, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, not only has Loyal’s imprint and influence throughout, he wrote the foreword. Loyal Jones is a brilliant, compassionate, funny and humble gentleman.”
From 1973 until ’93, Jones led Berea’s annual Celebration of Traditional Music. He has been involved with Hindman Settlement School, including as a director and chairman of the board, since 1978.
Jones and his wife, the former Nancy Swan, who died in 2016, were the parents of three children. Jones now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
Jones’ many awards include the President’s Medallion and W.D. Weatherford Award from Berea College, the Thomas Wolfe Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Society, and the Outstanding Contributor to Appalachian Literature and Culture Award from the Appalachian Writers Association.
Robert Hazel
Robert Hazel published five collections of poetry, three novels and several short stories. He was a much-admired teacher of writers who later became famous, including Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, James Baker Hall, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Rita Mae Brown and Charles Simic.
Robert Elvin Hazel was born June 27, 1921, in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of an Indiana University physicist. He served in the U.S. Marines during World War II and attended several colleges as an undergraduate, switching his major from science to English his junior year. He earned a B.A. from George Washington University and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro.
As a writer, Hazel was best known for his poetry. His first volume, Poems/1951-1961, had a glowing introduction from poet Allen Tate. “There is no poet of his generation to whom more has been given,” Tate wrote. “I do not know any younger American poet who has access to an associative imagery as rich and unpredictable as Mr. Hazel’s.”
James Dickey said of Hazel’s poetry: “His principal characteristic is fearlessness; he will say anything that comes into his head, or any other part of him.”
Hazel published three novels: The Lost Year (1953), A Field Full of People (1954) and Early Spring (1971). His best-known short story was “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
Hazel taught writing at the University of Kentucky from 1955-1961. He was fondly remembered by former students, five of whom are now members of the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
“Time after time, he didn’t hesitate to say that your writing wasn’t good enough,” Berry said. “He would go to great lengths to tell you why it wasn’t good enough.”
Mason remembered Hazel as a seductive personality who made his students believe they could become writers. “Professor Hazel embodied the glamour of the writing life,” she said.
“He was youthful, well-published—books of fiction and poetry—and available to us personally,” Norman said. “Bob could be casual with us students, but never at the expense of his authority.”
Norman said Hazel urged him to apply for a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. “I filled out my application, got cold feet, said I didn’t want to apply,” Norman recalled. “He said, ‘Gurney, if you don’t apply, I don’t want anything more to do with you.’ So I applied and a few weeks later got word I had been granted the fellowship. It was a life-changing experience.”
Hazel left UK and moved to Louisville to write before taking other teaching jobs at Oregon State and New York universities. At NYU, his students included Brown and Semic, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990. Hazel was poetry editor of The Nation magazine in 1972 and a writer-in-residence at Virginia Tech from 1974-79.
After teaching at Virginia Tech, he retired to Eustis, Florida, where he died of a heart attack on July 19, 1993.
Ted Poston
Ted Poston, born into a prominent Black family in Hopkinsville, was one of the first African American journalists to work for a White-owned metropolitan newspaper. During a 33-year career at the New York Post, he won two of journalism’s biggest awards.
Theodore Roosevelt Augustus Major Poston was born July 4, 1906, the youngest of eight children of educators Ephraim and Mollie Cox Poston. He graduated from Attucks High School in Hopkinsville in 1924 and what is now Tennessee State University in Nashville in 1928.
Poston began his career at age 15, writing for his family’s newspaper, the Hopkinsville Contender. He wrote for two major Black-owned newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News. A union activist, Poston was fired from the News for helping the American Newspaper Guild organize its staff.
He joined the New York Post in 1936 and soon became a star reporter. A favorite of publisher Dorothy Schiff, Poston lobbied her to hire more Black and Puerto Rican journalists. Showing he could succeed in areas closed to other Black journalists, Poston got exclusive interviews in 1940 with Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.
Poston chronicled the Harlem Renaissance, and his friends included writer Dorothy West and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
In the 1930s, Poston covered the trials of the Scottsboro Boys—nine young Black men who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. Because Alabama politicians wouldn’t allow Black journalists to report there, Poston disguised himself to cover the Scottsboro trials. “I sat up there in the Negro gallery in ragged overalls pretending to be a country boy … and I would make notes under the overcoat on my lap,” he said. White journalist friends wired his stories to New York.
During World War II, Poston worked in the Office of War Information in Washington as “Negro liaison” and served as a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Council of Negro Affairs, known as the Black Cabinet. After FDR’s death, Poston was among those who urged President Harry Truman to desegregate the military.
Poston covered such stories as Jackie Robinson joining Major League Baseball, the Brown v. Board of Education case, the Little Rock Nine, and the Birmingham bus boycott.
His best work was a series of articles about the Groveland Four case in Florida in 1949, in which four Black men were falsely accused of raping a young white woman. This work was recognized with two of journalism’s major writing prizes, the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Heywood Broun Award. New York University’s journalism school named Poston’s Groveland Four series one of the 100 most important journalistic works of the 20th century.
Poston, who was married three times, retired from the Post in 1972. He died on Jan. 11, 1974, in Brooklyn, New York, and is buried in Cave Spring Cemetery in Hopkinsville.
He was one of the first inductees into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame when it was created in 1990.
Biographer Kathleen A. Hauke chronicled his life in Ted Poston: Pioneering American Journalist (1999) and collected his best work in another book, A First Draft of History (2000).
Poston wrote 10 autobiographical short stories about growing up in segregated Hopkinsville. Hauke edited the stories and annotated them with recollections from the author’s family and friends. The collection was published as The Dark Side of Hopkinsville (1991).
Learn more at carnegiecenterlex.org.