Author Jennifer Haigh named as the 2024 Clinton and Mary Opal Moore Appalachian Writer’s Residency

MURRAY, Ky. – 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, Oct. 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. 

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 18 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, Haigh teaches in the Master of Fine Arts 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. 

The inaugural visiting writer for the Moore Residency was Robert Morgan, author of eleven books of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and eight books of fiction, including Gap Creek, which was a New York Times bestseller and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a selection for her book club. Other residency recipients have included novelist, playwright and arts activist, Robert Gipe; Affrilachian author and NAACP Image Award winner, Crystal Wilkinson;  New York Times bestselling author and current Poet Laureate of Kentucky, Silas House; and award-winning Eastern Band Cherokee author, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle. 

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 Murray State’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts, at 270-809-3940 or kdunn@murraystate.edu.