Author Georgia Green Stamper spoke about her book in the “Kentucky Live Series” on Thursday, April 9, 2009 at Barnes & Noble.
Her writing has garnered a host of awards and literary medallions from groups such as Lincoln Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, the Carnegie Center, and the Kentucky Arts Foundation. In 2008 her first book of essays You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World was published by Wind Publications. A reviewer from the Courier Journal called It “elegant in its simplicity—as well as simply elegant.†Elisabeth Knight, reviewing it for the Daily News commented “without her deft touch with the pen and her thought provoking and decisive verbal portraits, much of what she records might be lost in another generation.â€
Photo Album | Podcast | Audio File | Movie Clip
A native of Owen County in North Central Kentucky Georgia grew up on a tobacco farm on Eagle Creek not far from Corinth. She writes that the building of US Highway 25 in the 1920s though Corinth caused a population boom sending the towns numbers soaring to 265. After graduating from Transylvania University she taught English and theater and coached speech. She and her husband, an executive with Ashland Inc. lived in Ashland and raised three daughters.
When the last of her three daughters had graduated from college in 1999 she turned her attentions to writing. Her essays have been published in literary anthologies like New Growth (Jesse Stuart Foundation); Tobacco (Wind Publications); Daughters of the Land (Texas Tech University Press) and the Journal of Kentucky Studies.
In 2004 she began writing a bi-weekly column, Georgia on My Mind, for the Owenton News Herald. Her most recent story quite fittingly coming during “March Madness and the Sweet Sixteen Basketball Tournaments†describes the Corinth High School (student body 74) boys basketball team which won the Kentucky State Championship in April 1930 and played in the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament in Chicago. Their coach was Ted Hornback who would later be Athletic Director at WKU.
In 2006 she became a regular commentator for NPR member station WUKY in Lexington, Kentucky which has broadcast more than 60 of her commentaries including memorable ones on the “perils of dieting†which tells how a childhood incident of making “manure pies†prepared her to do battle with Atkins, South Beach and Weight Watchers. Her five grandchildren provide fodder for other tales.
