By his 17th birthday, had suffered the loss of both of his parents. Thomas Merton is the only Hall of Fame member who is not native to the United States. It wasn't until age 58 that he earned his bachelor's degree a year later, in 1991, he died of lung cancer. He received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He served as writer in residence at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Hartford. He earned Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominations for his 1973 volume of mostly love poems, Belly Song and Other Poems. After his release from prison, he continued to write. His first book, Poems from Prison, was published while he was still an inmate, and it speaks to the tragedy of incarcerated black men. To support his habit, he stole money from a convenience store, and spent nearly all of the 1960s in prison. He dropped out of school at 16, joined the army, and fought in Korea, where he was wounded and became addicted to drugs. He was born in Mississippi in 1931, and at about age 8, moved with his family to Paducah, where he lived most of the rest of his childhood. For the last thirty years of his life, he lived on a farm on the Harrison-Scott County line with his wife, Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, who's here with many family members tonight.Įtheridge Knight is one of the enduring voices of the Black Arts Movement, the poetic complement to the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. He served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. During this time, in addition to mentoring hundreds of young writers, he produced another novel, a novel-in-verse, and six volumes of poetry. He returned to UK in 1973, where he directed the creative writing program for more than 30 years.
He was a serious photographer, and wrote about photography for Aperture and Esquire magazines. His writing life co-existed always with his interest in photography. When he was 26, he published his first novel, Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings, and continued to write and publish short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post, Kenyon, many other periodicals. After graduating, he attended Stanford University on the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing. He then attended the University of Kentucky, eventually finding his way to the English Department. He attended Henry Clay High School, where he lettered in four sports, worked on his car, and, according to his wife, showed no attraction to literature. James Baker Hall was born in Lexington in 1935.
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