Leatha Kendrick

Leatha Kendrick holding a photograph of her farmstead in East Point, Kentucky.

Leatha Kendrick’s childhood was mostly spent in Franklin, Kentucky, where her father worked as a veterinarian and tobacco farmer. Her mother was an educator who emphasized to her children that they should excel, which is exactly what Kendrick did. She attended the University of Kentucky, eventually earning a master’s degree in literature and linguistics.

One of her teachers was Wendell Berry, who invited Kendrick and her husband, Will, to visit his farm. That visit shaped the choices that the couple made together about the geography of their lives. Through Berry, she saw how a rural life might be combined with intellectual engagement. She and Will soon bought a farmstead near Prestonsburg, Will’s hometown.

The years that followed were a storm of competing demands. Kendrick taught at the Prestonsburg Community College; gave birth to three daughters; raised a big garden; and preserved much of her family’s food. Yet she was increasingly aware that she needed to devote herself to writing. Will provided essential support and encouragement, and Kendrick completed her MFA in writing a few days after she turned 45. Since then, she has published books of poetry, as well as essays, fiction, and a script for a documentary film. A cancer diagnosis prompted a move to Lexington, where her writing community is more easily accessible, but she misses the interaction with the soil that she had in Prestonsburg.

“I’ve abandoned my rural roots, in a way,” Kendrick says. “I tend the page the way I used to tend the garden.”

At the center of this still life is a photograph of two-year-old Leatha Kendrick in her maternal grandmother’s arms. The picture was shot after the harvest in one of the wheat fields Kendrick’s grandfather farmed, on a piece of land that his father and grandfather had farmed as well.