Bluegrass Writers Coalition

When I was 7 years old my Grandma Joann gave me a journal. She told me to write a little each day or else I'll never remember what I forgot. Russell Baker's "Growing Up" made me realize my diaries and scribbled pieces of paper may have value someday. I read his memoir during the Great Recession when I was a college freshman at the University of Kentucky in the spring of 2009. I thought, if Russell's story can illustrate what it is like to grow up during the Great Depression for my history class now... then maybe if I write what happens to me during the Great Recession, I can do the same in the far-flung future. When I questioned whether or not my voice would ever have value, JD Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis" made The New York Times Best Seller list. Finally, Robert D. Putnam's book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" as well as Bill Bishop and Robert G. Kushing's "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart" changed my mind about the timing of it all. Maybe my story isn't for the far-flung future, maybe it matters now.

Abigail Keam is an award-winning and Amazon best-selling author who writes the Josiah Reynolds Mystery Series about a Southern female beekeeper turned amateur sleuth living in the glamorous world of oak-cured bourbon, antebellum mansions, and Thoroughbred farms. Besides loving history, Kentucky bourbon and chocolate, Abigail loves honeybees and for many years made her living by selling honey at a farmers’ market like her protagonist, Josiah Reynolds. She is an award-winning beekeeper who has won many honey awards at the Kentucky State Fair including the Barbara Horn Award, which is given to beekeepers who rate a perfect 100 in a honey competition. Miss Abigail has taken her knowledge of beekeeping to create a fictional beekeeping protagonist, Josiah Reynolds, who solves murder mysteries in the Bluegrass. While Miss Abigail’s novels are for enjoyment, she discusses the importance of a local sustainable food economy and land management for honeybees and other creatures. She currently lives on the Kentucky River in a metal house with her husband and various critters. She still has honeybees.

Catherine Perkins (she/her), semi-retired Thoroughbred trainer, part-time zero-turn mower operator, horse crossing guard, stand-up comedian and full time poet, is the author of "Udder Uproar," Accents Publishing 2024. "Udder Uproar" is a small collection of entertaining, often humorous, sometimes bawdy or risqué poetry.

Artie Ann Bates is a nature-lover and semi-retired psychiatrist living at the head of a holler in southeastern Kentucky. Her fiction and nonfiction are a sharing of Appalachian ways. Fiction publication includes the short story “Subsidence” in the Bluegrass Writers Coalition anthology as a finalist in their 2025 Kentucky Visions contest. It is from an unpublished collection, Kaintuck Stories, which was a finalist in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Grace Paley Short Fiction Contest, 2024. Another story from the collection, “Widow’s Breath,” was published in the 2024 issue of The Santa Fe Literary Review. Nonfiction work includes an unpublished grief memoir-in-essay collection, A Process Most Impossible, from which two entries have found homes. “Forming Thoughts” was published in The Periwinkle Pelican, April 2025, and “The Doctor Curse” appeared in The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Fall, 2024. Harvard’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration journal, Inquest, printed “Letcher is Us,” in the May 2024 issue, about the risks of another federal prison in southeast Kentucky. Based on research and written narration of the history of the inherited log house, barn, corn crib and smokehouse, the David Back Log House and Farm was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2019. Past publications include a children’s book, Ragsale, in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin, and essays in the anthologies Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (edited by Joyce Dyer) and Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (edited by Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson), as well as several in Appalachian Heritage Magazine. A book review of Pain Killer: A “Wonder” Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death by Barry Meier appeared in the Spring/Fall 2005 issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies.

Come Home to Story https://www.annhgabhart.com/

Bobbie Falin is a self-published science fiction/ fantasy author who is currently editing her fifth novel for early summer release. She enjoys reading, gardening, and yes, it is true: if they were taking volunteers to go into space, she would be the first in line.

Bradley P. Logan is an actor with an interest in writing short plays and adapting flash fiction from the page to the stage. He has appeared on stage in various community and professional theatres in the central Kentucky area. He serves on the board of directors for Pioneer Playhouse in Danville. Brad joined BWC in early 2024.

Bill Carman is a hunting and fishing guide and award-winning outdoor writer. His stories have appeared in numerous outdoor magazines, and he won the national Outdoor Life Book Club short story contest. He has written three books of hunting and fishing essays and authored a true crime book, Saving Noah, set in a small town in Kentucky. His latest book, Fishing with Daniel Boone, takes the reader on a fly fisherman’s journey to the rivers and streams of Daniel Boone’s life. Bill regularly conducts outdoor skills workshops, and he teaches outdoor writing at the Carnegie Center. He and his wife live in Lexington, Kentucky where he is teaching his grandchildren the ways of the woods. Bill can be reached at www.kentuckywildoutdoors.com.

Amethyst Drake has been making up stories her whole life, shaped by classic detective and espionage fiction from Agatha Christie to Columbo. What she loves most is drawing on her own experiences with mental health to build characters you won't forget and push them to their emotional and psychological limits. The first two novels in the Carson Crime Files series, The Scheme and Framed, are both B.R.A.G. Medallion honorees. The cozy spin-off Margaret Mitchell Mysteries brings a warmer touch to the same world. Newsletter subscribers get the first novella for free. Amethyst dreams up crimes for a living and considers it the best possible use of her time. Sign up for her newsletter or reach her at amethystdrake.com.

Carol June Franks is a retired teacher who, upon retirement, began her journey as a children's book author. Her stories give the reader a nostalgic experience and a cadence to be enjoyed by all ages. Unique to children's books, Carol includes guidance for parents and teachers to use the text to further children's reading and writing skills.

Chris Helvey is an award winning short-story writer, a poet, and a novelist. The author of more than a dozen novels and multiple short-story collections, Chris’ latest novel, Revolution, was recently released by Wings ePress, and is available in both paperback and e-book formats on Amazon. A founding member of the Bluegrass Writers Coalition, he is also editor-in-chief and publisher of Trajectory Journal.

Alan Goldstein, of Louisville, has been writing for over 40 years, with more than 150 articles published in various periodicals, including Astronomy magazine. Two won national awards. He debuted his first mid-grade fantasy novel through Dingbat Publishing in 2021. He retires as an interpretive naturalist at the Falls of the Ohio State Park in November 2025, where he created programs that reached hundreds of thousands of visitors and students for 31 years. He is a co-founder of the Louisville Writers' Meetup since early 2015. Activities include nature photography, gardening, fossil & mineral collecting, and curating his family’s history.