Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky. Founded in 1855, Berea College was the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. It was integrated from as early as 1866 until 1904, and again after 1954.
The Museum of Pop Culture or MoPOP is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, United States, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. It was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000 as the Experience Music Project. Since then MoPOP has organized dozens of exhibits, 17 of which have toured across the U.S. and internationally.
The Songwriters Hall of Fame (SHOF) is an American institution founded in 1969 by songwriter Johnny Mercer, music publisher/songwriter Abe Olman, and publisher/executive Howie Richmond to honor those whose work, represent, and maintain, the heritage and legacy of a spectrum of the most beloved English language songs from the world's popular music songbook. It not only celebrates these established songwriters, but is also involved in the development of new English language songwriting talent through workshops, showcases, and scholarships. There are many programs designed to teach and discover new English language songwriters. Nile Rodgers serves as the organization's chairman.
For a professional in the bluegrass music field, election to the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame is the highest honor the genre can bestow. An invitation can be extended to performers, songwriters, promoters, broadcasters, musicians, and executives in recognition of their contributions to the development of bluegrass music worldwide. The hall of fame honor was created in 1991 by the International Bluegrass Music Association and the inductees are honored annually at the International Bluegrass Music Awards ceremony. The Hall's first inductees were Bill Monroe, widely considered as the founder of the genre, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, two of bluegrass music's most pioneering and influential artists. Roy Acuff, the first living artist to join the Hall of Fame, was elected in 1962. The most recent inductees are Sam Bush, Wilma Lee Cooper, and David Grisman. The Hall itself is maintained at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky. The institution received its current name in 2007, and was known prior to this as the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Dottie Rambo was an American gospel singer and songwriter. She was a Grammy winning solo artist and multiple Dove award-winning artist. Along with ex-husband Buck and daughter Reba, she formed the award-winning southern Gospel group, The Rambos. She wrote more than 2,500 songs, including her most notable, "The Holy Hills of Heaven Call Me", "He Looked Beyond My Fault and Saw My Need", "We Shall Behold Him", and "I Go To the Rock".
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Gurney Norman is an American writer documentarian, and professor.
Silas Dwane House is an American writer best known for his novels. He is also a music journalist, environmental activist, and columnist. His fiction is known for its attention to the natural world, working-class characters, and the plight of the rural place and rural people. House is also known as a representative for LGBTQ Appalachians and Southerners, and is among the most visible LGBTQ people associated with rural America.
Billy Edward "Edd" Wheeler is an American songwriter, performer, writer, and visual artist.
Philip Lee Williams is an American novelist, poet, and essayist noted for his explorations of the natural world, intense human relationships, and aging. A native of Athens, Georgia, he grew up in the nearby town of Madison. He is the winner of many literary awards for his 21 published books, including the 2004 Michael Shaara Prize for his novel A Distant Flame, an examination of southerners who were against the Confederacy’s position in the American Civil War. He is also a winner of the Townsend Prize for Fiction for his novel The Heart of a Distant Forest, and has been named Georgia Author of the Year four times. In 2007, he was recipient of a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities. Williams's The Divine Comics: A Vaudeville Show in Three Acts, a 1000-page re-imagining of Dante's magnum opus, was published in the fall of 2011. His latest novels are Emerson's Brother (2012) and Far Beyond the Gates (2020) from Mercer University Press.
Donna Lee Shirley is a former manager of Mars Exploration at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is the author of the book Managing Martians: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman's Lifelong Quest to Get to Mars—and of the Team Behind the Space Robot That Has Captured the Imagination of the World.
Rebecca Caudill Ayars was an American writer of children's literature. More than twenty of her books were published. Tree of Freedom was a Newbery Honor Book in 1950. A Pocketful of Cricket, illustrated by Evaline Ness, was a Caldecott Honor Book.
Crystal E. Wilkinson is an African American feminist writer from Kentucky, and proponent of the Affrilachian Poet movement. She is winner of a 2022 NAACP Image Award and a 2021 O. Henry Prize winner; she's a 2020 USA Fellow of Creative Writing. She teaches at the University of Kentucky. Her work has primarily involved the stories of Black women and communities in the Appalachian and rural Southern canon. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Kentucky 2021.
The Latin Songwriters Hall of Fame (LSHOF) also known as La Musa Awards, was established on October 18, 2012, by Desmond Child and Rudy Pérez, and is located in Miami, Florida, United States. The hall of fame is dedicated to "educating, honoring and celebrating the lives and music of the world’s greatest Latin songwriters and composers". The hall of fame was conceived by Child after he realized that he was only the third Latino to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Pérez came up with the same idea after having discussions with Latin composers Manuel Alejandro and Armando Manzanero 16 years prior to its conception. Initially, the organization had only 119 participants which grew to over 15,000 members in two years from 21 Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries across Latin America, Europe, and the US. Nominations for the inductions are selected by its committee of music professionals, which consists of producers, composers, musicians, and performers, with the winners being voted by the general public. The only exception was for the 2022 inductees. To be eligible for a nomination, the songwriter, composer, or lyricist is required to have their first published work released at least 20 years prior to the year of induction.
The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame honors writers who have made significant contributions to the literary legacy of the state of Georgia. Established in 2000 by the University of Georgia Libraries’ Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Hall of Fame existed as a virtual presence until 2012, when it was given a physical space within the university's Richard B. Russell Building.
The Indiana Authors Awards, also known as the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards, is a literary awards program that recognizes and honors authors from Indiana and literary works about Indiana. In 2020, awards were given in eight categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, young adult literature, drama, genre and emerging. The awards program runs biennially, with books published in 2020 and 2021 honored in 2022. Winners receive a cash prize, an Indiana limestone award trophy, and the opportunity to select an Indiana library to receive a donation.
