Mike Mullins Honors Friend James Still During Appalachian Heritage Celebration

11/29/10

The public is invited to celebrate the fall issue of Appalachian Heritage at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, November 5, at the Appalachian Center Gallery in the Bruce Building.

At 8 p.m. Mike Mullins, a close friend and neighbor to James Still (1906-2001), the featured author for this issue, will present. Since 1977, Mullins has served as the executive director of Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky.

In 2003, Mullins received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Kentucky in honor of his service to eastern Kentucky. He was born in Hi Hat, Kentucky, a Floyd County coal camp, and graduated from Berea College in 1971. Subsequently he received a Masters in history from the University of Cincinnati.

James Still, whose work is featured in the fall issue of Appalachian Heritage, was widely viewed as the “Dean of Appalachian Literature” because of his status as an elder and because of the quintessentially Appalachian characters he created in his award-winning novel River of Earth, and in his short stories, poetry and children’s books. Still came to Knott County, Kentucky, in the early 1930s to work at Hindman Settlement School and remained there until his death in 2001.

Appalachian Heritage was founded in 1973 and has been sponsored by Berea College since 1985. It is one of only a dozen literary magazines selected for electronic distribution by Project Muse, the leading conveyor of electronic academic journals to academic libraries. Distributed by the University of North Carolina Press, Appalachian Heritage is a literary quarterly which publishes stories, poems and articles which pertain to the southern Appalachian region.