The Jack Ellis Writers Workshop

In October of 1945, Janice Holt married Henry Giles in Louisville just after he returned from service in World War II. After four years in Louisville, she and Henry moved to a forty-acre farm on Giles Ridge, an area where they would live until her death in 1979 and his death in 1986. By 1954, with Henry’s help, she had written and published eight books, all, with the exception [...]

This article was originally published in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly and is republished on this website with permission. Jesse Stuart (1906–1984), one of Appalachia’s most famous native sons, published more than 2,000 poems, 460 short stories, hundreds of essays, and sixty-four books describing a fast-dwindling mountain culture and the natural world that framed it. A regionalist often compared to William Faulkner for his sharp focus on a [...]

As a writer, teacher, and lecturer, Jesse Stuart extended his life to the far corners of the world. He traveled to all but one of the United States and to ninety countries on six continents. His global life began in the 1930s with a Guggenheim Fellowship that supported his travels to the British Isles and Europe. On July 9, 1937, he sailed from New York and landed in Scotland [...]

Janice Holt Giles (1909-79) was a prolific and successful writer of historical fiction and autobiographical non-fiction. She was born in Arkansas, the second of four children of educators John Albert Holt and Lucy Elizabeth McGraw Holt. She didn’t begin her first novel until 1946, when she was 41 years old, and did not finish it until four years later. She met an Army sergeant, Henry Giles, on a bus [...]