Ian Hall
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His debut collection, Creekwater Mansions, was released by EastOver Press in April 2026. He holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a PhD in English from Florida State University. He appeared on Narrative Magazine’s ‘30 Below 30’ list, and he was named the winner of the 2025 Princemere Poetry Prize, he was named a finalist for the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Prize, the 2024 Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. He lives in Knott County, Kentucky.
Featured Book
Creekwater Mansions
Creekwater Mansions, a künstlerromanic collection of poems, documents the gross iterations of intimacy—socioeconomic, geographic, interpersonal, or homeostatic—that people under duress often practice: a boy piping cigarette smoke down the swollen ductwork of his granddad’s throat because the old man is too feeble to draw breath; a man trying desperately to preserve the fossil of musk that lingers in his late father’s work-shirt as his own son stares on through a chink in the wall; two cousins playing doctor on their dwindling grandmother while she takes a nap. These are the variations of affection and kinship, so informed by and inextricable from the macabre tedium of daily life in Southeastern Kentucky, that abide in the back pews, dialysis clinics, and County-Line Liquors of the author’s childhood.
Meet Ian Hall and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.