Mary Ann Taylor-Hall was born Oct. 17, 1937, in Chicago, but spent much of her childhood in Florida. She attended the University of Florida and earned a masters in English at Columbia University. She taught at Auburn University, Miami of Ohio and the University of Puerto Rico before coming to the University of Kentucky in 1977. She met and married her creative writing colleague, James Baker Hall, in 1982. Taylor-Hall’s most famous novel is Come and Go, Molly Snow, is about a single mother and musician, and considered a Kentucky classic. She has also published a book of short stories and three volumes of poetry. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in the Paris Review, the Sewanee Review and the Kenyon Review.
Her stories and poetry are inseparable from the rural landscape of Harrison County where she has found inspiration for nearly 5 decades. On March 25 she will be one of the three living inductees honored and welcomed into the Carnegie Center’s Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame 2024.
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"It seems to me that almost everybody in Kentucky has a background that is worth fiction: how they got here, why they stayed, what happened on the way," she said. "I think that's one reason Kentucky is so rich in writers. It's both the people who live here, and it's the landscape. You drive down the roads, and you see history. People want to write about their own history or their parents' history, or they know a story they've been told. It's a storytelling place."