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 over a hundred and fifty years.
A graduate
of Transylvania University, Stamper is a former high school
English and theater teacher and speech team coach. She was
a published writer by the time she finished first grade
when a poem she wrote appeared in the nationally circulated
children’s magazine, “Wee Wisdom.” Despite that precocious
beginning, Stamper’s writing career lay dormant for
decades. She says she did not begin writing “seriously”
until her youngest daughter graduated from college in 1999.
In the years since, her essays have received many awards
including the Emma Bell Miles Award for Essay from Lincoln
Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Literary Festival,
the Carole Pettit Creative Writing Medallion and Legacies
Award from the Carnegie Center, the Leadingham Prose Award
from the Frankfort (KY) Arts Foundation, and from The
Appalachian Writers Association and Green River Writers.
Her work has been published in the literary
anthologies New Growth
(Jesse Stuart
Foundation); Tobacco
(Wind
Publications); Daughters of the
Land (in press
- Texas Tech U
Press); and “The Journal of Kentucky Studies” (Northern KY
U.)
Since 2004, she has written a bi-weekly column, “Georgia:
On My Mind,” for The Owenton (KY) News-Herald. In early
2006, she became a regular commentator for NPR member
station WUKY affiliated with the University of Kentucky.
Over sixty of her commentaries have aired in the WUKY
listening market.
Georgia and her husband, Ernie, spent much of their adult
working lives in Ashland, in far eastern Kentucky, where he
was an executive with Ashland Inc. They now live in
Lexington. They are the parents of three daughters and have
four grandchildren.