WKU Libraries blog

Barry Kitterman, this month’s featured speaker in our Far Away Places series, coordinates the creative writing program and visiting writers series at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN where he’s been a member of the faculty since 1994. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana, he’s taught writing and literature at Indiana University East, Miami University of Ohio and at two universities in China, Nankai and Qingdao. In 1989-90 he was the Hudson Walker Fellow at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, MA.

Kitterman’s play Mary Alice’s Ladder was recently presented in a staged reading at the Roxy Regional Theater in Clarkesville. He’s the fiction editor of Zone 3 Magazine and has published stories in: The Long Story, Cutbank, California Quarterly and Carolina Quarterly.

His first novel, The Baker’s Boy, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 2008 and in 2009 won the Maria Thomas Fiction Award. He drew inspiration from his work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize in the 1970s.

Set in Central American and Middle Tennessee it tells the story of a former Peace Corps worker at a boys’ training school in Belize near the Guatemalan border who thirty years later is toiling as a baker while still haunted by his earlier experience. Kitterman spent almost a decade writing the novel which has drawn praise from critics everywhere.

He’ll be talking about his experiences in 1970s Belize as well as about his novel and creative writing on Thursday, November 19 at 7:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Books, 1680 Campbell Lane. A book signing will follow. Please call 745-6121 for more information.

On Thursday, November 19, Peruvian Folk Rock Artist Oscar Pajares Ruiz performed Peruvian folk music and dance to an enthusiastic audience of faculty and students at Java City-Helm Library.

This was part of the Java City-Helm Library concert series sponsored by the Independence Bank.

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The WKU Theatre Department performed “Cinderella: The World’s Favorite Fairy Tale” for school audiences at the Kentucky Library & Museum. The story of Cinderella as she is known in China, Russian and by Native Americans as told by Cinderella herself.

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Lena Grey Annis, 1897-1996

Born in 1897 at Borah’s Ferry in Butler County, Lena Grey Annis taught school for 44 years in Kentucky, West Virginia and Arizona.  After her death in 1996, two of her nieces found a treasure trove of family history among her personal belongings.  Included were some 800 letters, written mostly to Annis by family members.  Although the bulk of the letters dated from 1945 to 1973, the complete collection covered 70 years.  

After carefully sorting and reading the letters and compiling a family tree to show the relationships of the writers, Annis’s niece, Doris Annis Tichenor, recently donated the collection to the Kentucky Library & Museum.  Tichenor herself best explains the significance of the letters.  They represent, she wrote, “a remarkable contemporary record” of change in a Kentucky farming family–from the advent of electricity and the first tractors and pickup trucks to the shift from animal feed crops to cash crops, the passing of home poultry flocks, the struggle to control flooding, and the closing of Borah’s Ferry, a fixture in Butler County for 150 years.  Annis spent 20 years of her teaching career in Arizona but returned to Kentucky almost every summer, where she retained a share in the family farm.  The letters also document, in Tichenor’s words, the “difficult and tedious work” of “five fractious siblings and their descendants” to hold the farming enterprise together. 

A finding aid for the Lena Grey Annis Collection can be downloaded at:  http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/988

Born in Kevil, Kentucky, 29-year old  Sarah Elizabeth Burkey, Singer-Songwriter, Recording Artist, and Actress, has performed all over the US and toured in 18 countries. Today at Java City she performed her original compositions as well as her arrangements of well-known traditional songs to a very appreciative crowd on the patio outside the Java City in Helm Library on November 10, 2009.

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Featuring more than 500 pieces of furniture, paintings and other decorative art items that date from as early as 1300 B.C. to the mid-twentieth century, theSnell-Franklin Gallery at the Kentucky Library & Museum opened on Friday, November 13, 2009.

Timothy Mullin, Director of the Kentucky Library & Museum, said, “With the exception of the Snell European collection, most of the pieces are from the state of Kentucky. There are Shaker pieces from South Union and Mt. Pleasant and several wonderful pieces from our own university including a table and glassware set that former President Cherry owned.”

The festivities kicked off with a Chamber ribbon cutting in the morning and concluded with an evening reception with a Roaring Twenties theme. Community members and WKU faculty and staff attended the evening event.

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Alice Hegan Rice

The Kentucky Library & Museum has contributed a photo of author Alice Hegan Rice to an upcoming exhibit at Louisville’s Speed Museum relating to its founder, Hattie Bishop Speed.

A lifelong resident of Louisville, Alice Hegan Rice (1870-1942) published many popular novels and stories, but it was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), inspired by her experiences working with the city’s underprivileged, that made her famous.  Selling 650,000 copies in its first two years, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch generated numerous stage, screen and radio adaptations and brought notoriety to Louisville’s Cabbage Patch district and to Mary Bass, a resident of the area who was the model for “Mrs. Wiggs.”

Rice and her husband Cale Young Rice (1872-1943), himself an author, dramatist and poet, enjoyed a personal and professional partnership that lasted more than 40 years and brought them into contact with such early 20th-century notables as Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Ida Tarbell, Henry Watterson and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Kentucky Library and Museum holds a large collection of correspondence, manuscripts, clippings and scrapbooks relating to the life and career of both Alice Hegan Rice and Cale Young Rice.  A finding aid can be downloaded at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/dlsc_mss_fin_aid/366

Click here for even more information on the Kentucky Library & Museum’s Rice collection, and here for information on the Speed Museum exhibit.

Robert Dickey was the featured speaker in this month’s Kentucky Live! on Thursday, November 12, 2009 at Barnes & Noble.  Dickey attended WKU and graduated from Centre  College.  Following a stint in the marines and a hitch as a reporter for the Bowling Green Daily News he graduated from Vanderbilt Law School.  His first client was Beech Bend Park owner Charles Garvin.  In Charles Garvin’s Dynasty of Dimes he tells the history of a man who he calls an “eccentric entrepreneur” who built an amusement park “empire” in Bowling Green, Kentucky based on 10 cent admissions.  It’s a fascinating story spanning four decades, and one indelibly linked with the tourist business in South Central Kentucky.

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Dr. Joe Sarnowski's new book

Dr. Joe E. Sarnowski, Chair of the Department of English at San Diego Christian College in El Cajon, California, has just published his book, The Literary Achievement of the American Poet Robert Penn Warren: His Life-Long Struggles with Morality, Myth, and Modernity (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009).