Leatha Kendrick
Kentucky poet, writer, and educator, Leatha Kendrick is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including the 2013 Sallie Bingham Award from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and Transylvania University’s 2025 Judy Gaines Young Book Award. Her poems and essays have appeared in anthologies including The Southern Poetry Anthology: Contemporary Appalachia, I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists, and What Comes Down to Us: Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets. In addition to teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky and in Morehead State University’s graduate program, she has served as writer-in-residence, mentor, and workshop leader at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning for over 25 years.
Featured Book
Interior with Poplar
Threaded with rivers, birds, and trees, Interior with Poplar addresses transience and resilience—the desire to lay everything down set against the will to go on. In this collection, Leatha Kendrick alternately celebrates the deep joys of a long marriage and the equal imperative of separateness and solitude. The poems in Interior with Poplar render roles the poet takes up and abandons, places she loves and leaves, and aging as shadow and as light, landing with jubilation in uncertainty. In Leatha Kendrick’s deft hands, the poplar tree stands as witness, sentinel, and placeholder to these resonant, rooted poems of love and memory.
Meet Leatha Kendrick and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.