The Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State University is pleased to announce acclaimed author Jennifer Haigh as the 2024 Clinton and Mary Opal Moore Appalachian Writer in Residency. Haigh will read from her work on Thursday, October 24 at 7:30 p.m. in the Curris Center Theater on Murray State’s campus.
The event is free and open to the public. Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Since then, she has published six more critically-acclaimed works of fiction, most recently Mercy Street -- named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and winner of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Published in eighteen languages, her books have won the Bridge Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the PEN New England Award in Fiction, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Guggenheim fellow, she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.
Her new novel, Rabbit Moon, will be published by Little, Brown in April 2025. Haigh has been called “(a) gifted chronicler of the human condition” by Washington Post Book World, and an “expert natural storyteller with a keen sense of her characters’ humanity” by The New York Times. The author Richard Ford described Haigh’s novel Heat & Light as “Pure novelistic virtuosity. It’s brilliant, beginning to end.” The Clinton and Mary Opal Moore Appalachian Writer’s Residency was established with gifts from Shirley Moore Menendez, John C. Moore, Tom Moore, Nancy Moore Waldrop and Jayne Moore Waldrop in honor of their late parents and their family’s eastern Kentucky roots. Clinton Elster Moore (1916-2008) and Mary Opal Moore (1922-2015) were born in eastern Kentucky – Pike and Letcher counties, respectively – but left the mountains in the early 1950s when they moved to far western Kentucky. They settled in Paducah where they remained for the rest of their lives, but they always considered Appalachia their home.
The Moore Residency was created to strengthen literary connections between Appalachia and western Kentucky while enhancing the creative and professional growth of students in the creative writing program at Murray State. It commemorates the Moores’ east-to-west journey in hopes of fostering creativity and understanding between two distinct regions in Kentucky connected by the Cumberland River. The Clinton and Mary Opal Moore Appalachian Writer’s Residency takes place during the fall semester and includes a one-week stay for the writer in a private cabin owned by the family and overlooking Lake Barkley.
For more information about the residency, please contact Dr. Gwendolyn Paradice at 270.809.2401 or gparadice@murraystate.edu; or Kala Dunn, Director of Development for CHFA, at 270.809.3940 or kdunn@murraystate.edu.