By Lauren Conrad

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This week’s Writer’s Series, presented by the Student Activities Board, will be Thursday, October 13 from 6-8 p.m. in the Student Center Small Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public.

Maureen Morehead and Erik Reece, the two authors that will be speaking at Thursday’s Writer’s Series, are no strangers to the Kentucky scene.

Maureen Morehead, Kentucky Poet Laureate through 2012 as appointed by Gov. Steve Beshear, has published three collections of poetry: “In a Yellow Room,” “A Sense of Time Left” and “The Melancholy Teacher.” Morehead also collaborated with Pat Carr on the book “Our Brothers’ War,” which is based on Kentucky women during the Civil War. She is also working on a fifth book, “Late August Blues: The Daylily Poems”.

Morehead’s work has been featured in “The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State,” and “Kentucky Voices: A Bicentennial Celebration of Kentucky Writing.”

Erik Reece, a UK graduate and Lexington resident, is the author of two books, “Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia” and “An American Gospel: On Family, History, and The Kingdom of God.”

Reece’s work has been featured in famous periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, and Orion Magazine. He has won both the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award and the Columbia University School of Journalism’s 2005 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism.

Morehead and Reece are both actively involved in the Kentucky community. As Kentucky Poet Laureate, Morehead has been traveling and discussing literature and poetry to organizations across the state.

The format of the series is for each author to read a sample of their work and to discuss any upcoming work. A Q&A session will be held for both authors at the end of the event.

“In this series we are trying to have a focus on their background in Kentucky and how that has influenced their writing,” said Shannon Ruhl, Cultural Arts Director for SAB.

The Writer’s Series is an ongoing event that occurs every two weeks through November 8. The series is in honor of the late James Baker Hall, who was a renowned Kentucky writer and UK faculty member.

“It is a standard of the Writer’s Series is to have all Kentucky-influenced writers featured at each event,” Ruhl said. “James Baker Hall died two years ago, and it is our goal to build upon his legacy as a Kentucky artist and writer. “