Georgia Green Stamper is a seventh generation Kentuckian on both sides of her family tree. She grew up on a tobacco farm in Owen County, in the north central section of the state. 

She and her husband Ernie still own the Eagle Creek family land which has belonged to one member or another of her mother’s people for nearly two hundred years.

EARLY LIFE

Georgia’s father was a farmer who loved to read, and her mother was a high school science teacher. Both were keepers of stories, and they instilled an appreciation of local and family history into their only child. The oral tradition of storytelling that thrived not only in her home but throughout the rural Kentucky culture of her childhood lives on in Georgia’s writing. 

She attended Owen County’s rural schools in grades one through twelve and graduated from Transylvania University with a degree in English and Drama, and secondary education certification. Soon after her graduation from Transylvania, Georgia married her college sweetheart, Ernie Stamper. They moved to Ashland on the far eastern edge of the state where the mountains of Appalachia meet the industrialized Ohio River valley.  These two rich Kentucky cultures – previously unfamiliar to her – would shape her adulthood.  She and her husband Ernie would spend their working years in the Ashland area and raise their three daughters there. 

WRITING LIFE 

Although writing was her youthful ambition (“don’t all English majors want to be authors?” she asks), Georgia did not begin writing until late mid-life when she says she “finally ran out of excuses not to.” She credits her “beginning” to the encouragement she received from the writing community at Lexington’s Carnegie Center for Learning and Literacy. She found additional ongoing support at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School. 

In the years since, her work has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, magazines and newspapers, and appears regularly as the back page essay in Kentucky Humanities magazine. Her earlier books, You Can Go Anywhere (Wind 2008) and Butter in the Morning (Wind 2012), were both jury selected in their respective years of publication for inclusion in the reading series “New Books by Great Kentucky Writers” at Lexington’s Carnegie Center.

She also has read many of her stories on NPR member station WUKY. Affiliated with the Kentucky Humanities Speakers Bureau, Georgia speaks frequently to groups throughout the state about the importance of preserving local and personal stories.

CURRENT LIFE

Georgia and her husband Ernie now live in Lexington where she writes and drives their six grandchildren wherever the children need to go – but of course, she tells them a family story along the way. Small Acreages is her third collection of essays. 

Georgia Green Stamper is available for presentations to clubs and other groups, readings, and for workshop instruction.  

She will speak to any book club that chooses to read any of her books as a group. If possible and within driving distance of Lexington, she will attend in person. For book clubs outside central and eastern Kentucky, she is available for Zoom and Skype sessions.