The 17th annual Kentucky Women’s Book Festival will feature several authors virtually on Microsoft Teams. The festival will be recorded and posted afterwards.

Emily Bingham

The festival’s opening speaker will be Emily Bingham. Born in Louisville, Kentucky into a journalism family, Emily early on decided she wanted to write. Among her grade-school efforts was a poem inspired by the typewriter her father gave her as a child, and on which he typed bedtime stories as he told them. Her poem, “Typewriter,” weighed the options—poet, novelist, journalist. The opportunity to dig deep into the past to tell true stories that shine a light on how we got here came later when she caught the bug for archival research and enrolled in Chapel Hill’s US history doctoral program.

Emily is currently Visiting Honors Faculty Fellow at Bellarmine University. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in Vogue, Ohio Valley History, The Journal of Southern History, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and New England Review. Her books are Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham (2015), Mordecai: An Early American Family (2003), and, as editor with Thomas A. Underwood, The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I’ll Take My Stand (2001).

Her most recent book, My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life of Reckoning of An Iconic American Song, unearths performances, recordings, and protests, tracing one song’s entrance into the bloodstream of American life and through to its twenty-first century reassessment. This revelatory account of how a melody can be so memorable but also so formed by forgetting is a story for a country yearning for healing.

She and her husband Stephen Reily have three children.

Other speakers will include:

Farrah Alexander

Writer, author, and activist. Her books include, RAISING THE RESISTANCE: A Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism and Resistance in the Bluegrass: Empowering the Commonwealth.

Farrah Alexander is a writer, author, and activist. Through activism and the notable wins and losses of the past several years, she became inspired by attorneys who so often were thrown into first responder roles defending the rights of those in need. Believing law is an effective and direct way to enact the positive change we wish to see, she began pursuing her J.D. at Indiana University McKinney School of law. Currently, she is a student in the U of L Brandeis School of Law.

Her debut book, RAISING THE RESISTANCE: A Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism was published by Mango Media in 2020. Her latest book, RESISTANCE IN THE BLUEGRASS:Empowering the Commonwealth was published by the University of Kentucky Press in 2022 and featured a foreword by Rep. Attica Scott.

From the anti-segregation sit-ins of the 1960s to the 2020 protests in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, the rest of the nation—and often the world—has watched as Kentuckians boldly fought against injustice. In Resistance in the Bluegrass: Empoweringthe Commonwealth, Farrah Alexander outlines how Kentucky’s activists have opposed racism, discrimination, economic inequality, and practices that accelerate climate change; advocated for better education, more humane immigration policies, and appropriate political representation; and supported LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, while also celebrating decades of Kentucky contributions to social justice movements and the people behind them.

Angela Jackson-Brown

An award-winning writer, poet and playwright. Her books include, Drinking from a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and the 2022 upcoming novel, The Light Always Breaks.

Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is a member of the graduate faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY.  This fall 2022, she will be joined the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington as an Associate Professor.

She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Spalding low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing.  She has published her short fiction, Creative Nonfiction and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking from a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and the 2022 upcoming novel, The Light Always Breaks.  When Stars Rain Down is a highly acclaimed novel that received a starred review from the Library Journal and Glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few.  It was also named a finalist for the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction.

The Women’s Center hosts the event, which is part of the university’s observance of Women’s History Month.

Date: March 4, 2023 from

Time: 10:00am - 1:00pm

Location: Online

Register: https://bit.ly/3vDYzfY

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