Join us on the last Monday of each month for an evening of literature at the Kentucky Native Café, where featured writers share words that invite listeners into new and interesting landscapes. In the warmth of summer, we gather under the trees and fairy lights in the café garden; in winter, we meet in the Michler's historic greenhouses. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., and readings begin at 8:00 p.m.

The Kentucky Native Café is typically closed on Mondays but opens specially for these gatherings to serve wine, beer, and a special cocktail for our community audience. Free parking is available at 446 E High St; limited parking at 417 E Maxwell.

May 26th

Joseph Survant is an acclaimed Kentucky poet and Professor Emeritus of English at Western Kentucky University. He served as Kentucky’s Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004, recognized for his evocative portrayals of the state's history and landscapes.His notable works include The Land We Dreamed, Rafting Rise, Anne & Alpheus, 1842–1882, and View from the Stork Building: Chinese Variations. Survant's poetry has been featured internationally, reflecting his deep connection to Kentucky's cultural heritage and his engagement with global literary traditions.

2025

January 2025

George Ella Lyon is a poet, author, and educator renowned for her lyrical writing that often delves into themes of identity, place, family, and the human experience. A native of Harlan, Kentucky, Lyon has published numerous collections of poetry, including Catalpa (1993), She Let Herself Go (2006), and The Many-Storied House (2013). She is also well-known for her children's books, including All the Water in the World (2011), What Forest Knows (2014), and Voices of Justice: Poems About People Working for a Better World (2020). Her poem, Where I'm From, has become widely known and frequently used in classrooms around the world as an example of the personal narrative. Over the course of her career, Lyon has been awarded several prestigious awards for her work, including the American Library Association's Schneider Family Book Award, a Jane Addams Honor, a Golden Kite and the Bluegrass Award. She was appointed to serve as the Kentucky Poet Laureate from 2015-2016.

Dorian Hairston is a poet, educator, and former college athlete from Lexington, KY. His first collection of poetry, Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow, explores the life and legacy of Josh Gibson, the greatest Catcher to play the game of baseball. He is an Affrilachian Poet and his work has appeared in Shale, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and pluck! Hairston is a beloved English teacher at Frederick Douglass High School in Lexington, Kentucky.

February 2025

Sarah Gorham is the author of four poetry collections, Bad Daughter (2011), The Cure (2003), The Tension Zone (1996), and Don't Go Back to Sleep (1989). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2006, American Poetry Review, The Nation, Kenyon Review, and many others. Gorham was awarded a 2013 NEA fellowship in creative writing. In 1994, she co-founded Sarabande Books, a Louisville-based literary press, with her husband Jeffrey Skinner, a poet and playwright. Gorham's most recent publication, Funeral Playlist, offers a collection of short stories that "explore the interplay of music, prose, and mortality."

Jeffrey Skinner is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Throughout his career, he has published several collections, including Glaciology (2014), A Guide to Forgetting (1987), and his most recent publication, Sober Ghost (2024). He received the 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2015 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry, among others. He has received numerous residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Skinner is the co-founder of Sarabande books with his wife, Sarah Gorham. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Louisville.

March 2025

Diane Arnson Svarlien is a verse translator and classicist. She has published three volumes of verse translations of the plays of Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus (Hackett, 2007), Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women (Hackett, 2012), and Ion, Helen, Orestes (Hackett, 2016). Her translations of Euripides are widely performed, and her other translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her most recent translations of Aristophenes, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria, Frogs, were published in October 2024 by Hackett Classics. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for translations and original Latin and Greek verse for the journal Classical Outlook. Arnson Svarlien also leads a local non-profit, KidsBooksLex, which has a mission of providing books and literature to students and families free of cost.

April 2025

Allegra Solomon is a fiction writer from Columbus, Ohio, with an MFA from the University of Kentucky and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Ohio University. Her debut short story collection won the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Iron Horse Literary Review/TTU First Book Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared in the Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, American Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Lolwe, and more. Her debut collection, There's Nothing Left for You Here, will be released March 15, 2025 with Four Way Books.

Alfonso Zapata is a poet living in Lexington, Kentucky. He received his MFA in poetry at The University of Kentucky, and has attended The University of Toledo and The University of Southern Mississippi, where he received his MA in English. He has previously received the 2022 & 2023 University of Kentucky MFA Poetry Awards, and his poetry collection won the 2024 TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize. His chapbook, Together Now, was released in 2024 by Belle Point Press, and his debut poetry collection To Pay for Our Next Breath is available now.

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January 2024

Bobbie Ann Mason, award-winning novelist, memoirist, and short-fiction writer, is one of
the crowning jewels of Kentucky and the South.

John Lackey, poet, painter, printer, filmmaker, songwriter, and woodcarver, is a Lexington native working out of his studio, Homegrown Press Studio and Gallery on North Limestone.

February 2024

Carrie Mullins is a novelist and short-fiction writer. Her first novel, Night Garden, was published in 2016. She is a native of Mount Vernon, Kentucky.

Richard Taylor, poet laureate of Kentucky from 1999 to 2001 and co-owner of Poor Richard's Books in Frankfort, retired after fourteen years from Transylvania University as Keenan Visiting Writer. His latest release, Fathers, is a biographical collection of essays.

March 2024

Crystal Wilkinson was the Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023, and she is currently a Bush-Holbrook Professor in creative writing at the University of Kentucky. Her latest release is Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir.

Julia Johnson, author of Naming the Afternoon (poems), The Falling Horse, and, most recently, Subsidence, teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

April 2024

Frank X Walker is a a professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. He has published ten collections of poetry, and his latest work is Load in Nine Times.

Jim Embry is a gardener, speaker, organizer, photographer, and essayist, and has an extensive background in community and civil-rights activism. His work, Jim Embry Reader: Black and Green, is set to be published late 2024.

May 2024

Tarence Ray is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Trillbilly Worker's Party living in Lexington. He has published stories in The Baffler, The Nation, interviewed with This is Hell! podcast, and created a video series on Means TV, among other things.

Melissa Bell-Pitts is a burgeoning novelist and former journalist living in Lexington. She teaches writing classes at the Carnegie Center for Learning and Literacy. She was selected as a finalist in the Next Great Writer Contest and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference's Betty Gabehart Prize. Her work has been featured in New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings, Limestone: A Journal of Art and Literature, Undead: A Poetry Anthology, and I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her first book, The Arc of the Mallet, is expected to be published in 2025.

July 2024

Katerina Stoykova is the author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and The Poet's Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry (McFarland, 2024). Katerina is the founder and senior editor of Accents Publishing, as well as the creator of the Accents podcast on WUKY. Katerina currently serves as a Director of the Kentucky Book Festival, as well as the Director for the Center for the Book in Kentucky. 

Diane Arnson Svarlien has published three volumes of verse translations of the plays of Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus (Hackett, 2007), Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women (Hackett, 2012), and Ion, Helen, Orestes (Hackett, 2016). Her translations of Euripides are widely performed, and her other translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for translations and original Latin and Greek verse for the journal Classical Outlook. Arson Svarlien also leads a local non-profit, KidsBooksLex, which has a mission of providing books and literature to students and families free of cost.

August 2024

Don Boes received a B.A. in English from Centre College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University. On three occasions, Don has been awarded an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. He has also been a resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago. Poems have appeared in many magazines and in three anthologies. His first book, The Eighth Continent, was chosen by A. R. Ammons as the recipient of the 1993 Samuel Morse Poetry Prize and published by Northeastern University Press. His chapbook, Railroad Crossing, was published in 2005 and his next book, Good Luck with That, was published in 2015 by FutureCycle Press. He is currently working with his spouse on co-translating the selected poems of the French poet, Henri Meschonnic. The working title is The Butterfly Tree: The Selected Poems of Henri Meschonnic. He teaches at Bluegrass Community and Technical College.

Rosie Moosnick is a Kentucky native and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of three books, Adopting Maternity: White Women Who Adopt Transracially and/or Transnationally (Praeger, 2004), Arab and Jewish Women in Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity (University Press of KY, 2012, 2021), and Campus Candor: Students' Stories Unmasked (Cognella, 2023).

Victoria Cruz-Falk is an author and dedicated public servant who currently serves as the legislative aide to Lexington's Vice Mayor. A valued member of the Kentucky Native Café family, Tori previously worked as a staff member at the café before shifting her focus to local government. She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2020 with a background in international relations and Spanish. In 2023, she co-authored Campus Candor: Students’ Stories Unmasked alongside professor, Nora Moosnick, and fellow former students. The book delves into the urban-rural divide and class differences on college campuses, offering an oral history that documents the experiences of students at public universities in the South.

September 2024

Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including his most recent, Lark Ascending, which was a Booklist Editors' Choice and is the winner of the 2023 Southern Book Prize and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award. In 2022 he was the recipient of the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation. In 2023 he was inducted as the Poet Laureate of Kentucky for 2023-2025 and became a Grammy finalist. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Garden & Gun, The New York Times, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tri Quarterly, and many more of the country's leading publications. House teaches at Berea College and at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing.

David Arnold is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Mosquitoland, I Loved You in Another Life, The Electric Kingdom, Kids of Appetite, Luminous Beings, and The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. He has won the Southern Book Prize and the Great Lakes Book Award, and was named a Publishers Weekly Flying Start for his debut. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and son. Learn more at davidarnoldbooks.com and follow him on Instagram
@iamdavidarnold.

October 2024

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Clear Creek, Utopia Drive, and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University’s John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing. His work has appeared in Harper’s, the Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and elsewhere. His two earlier collections of poetry, A Short History of the Present and Animals at Full Moon, were published by Larkspur Press. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

Eric Scott Sutherland is the author of five full-length collections of poetry: tall tales (1999), the psychonaut sails (2000), incommunicado (2007), pendulum (2014) and his latest, Earth Is My Church (2020). He created the now legendary Holler Poets Series, a monthly celebration of literature and music that ran 100 consecutive months, from May 2008 through September 2016.  During the third anniversary celebration in 2011, he was officially proclaimed Poet Laureate of Al’s Bar. Eric's poetry has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize- "plague" from pendulum and "Kentucky is my body" from Earth Is My Church.  His latest collection was nominated for the Weatherford Award, given annually for Appalachian Book of the Year.