James Baker Hall Foundation is proud to announce a collaboration with Christopher McCurry, poet, educator, social activist and owner of Workhorse LLC, renowned in the Bluegrass for nearly 20 years helping students and working writers learn and enjoy their craft.

“We are very excited about the collaboration with Mr. McCurry and Workhorse,” commented Lawrence Pemble, Managing Director of the James Baker Hall Foundation, “he believes anyone can write poetry and everyone should. He is a perfect partner for us.”

McCurry, a native of Paris, Kentucky, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and featured on NPR’s On Point as a Best Book of 2016 for his chapbook of marriage sonnets Nearly Perfect Photograph. He is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is a high school English teacher at Lafayette High School in Lexington and was awarded the 2021 Kentucky High School Teacher of the Year honors by the Kentucky Department of Education.

The James Baker Hall Foundation will provide multi-year funding to programs McCurry has developed in the Bluegrass targeting young writers. The grants will allow McCurry to expand geographically and increase the number of supported writers from across the Commonwealth.

The partnership begins immediately and includes the following:

This month, March 2025, the James Baker Hall Foundation is sponsoring the Lafayette High School Young Writers Conference. The one-day event organized by McCurry’s Creative Writing Class is hosted by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington and connects with other high school writing programs across Kentucky. The Foundation is sponsoring a cohort of Appalachian students from Melissa Helton’s Ironwood Writers Studio at the Hindman Settlement School to attend the conference. This paradigm of closely mentored experiences for young writers is so powerful! For many it will support a lifelong community transcending geographies and prejudice, built on the heritage of Kentucky literature “good enough to warrant recognition far beyond the borders of our Commonwealth.”

In June 2025, the James Baker Hall Foundation will begin sponsorship of Lexington Poetry Month. Developed by McCurry, “LexPoMo” has been challenging poets throughout Kentucky for more than a decade to write a poem every day the month of June and submit five of them for consideration to be included in the annual anthology published by McCurry’s Workhorse company. The program receives 3000+ submissions from across the Commonwealth each year and is thought to be the largest generative literary event in Kentucky.

Workhorse Mentors is McCurry’s nascent platform for literary matchmaking! A digital marketplace where developing writers find published authors available to serve as mentors. Workhorse oversees the match and with the Foundation contracts with each mentor to meet the writer’s needs. The James Baker Hall Foundation grant will underwrite compensation for mentors in the system and provide McCurry development capital to build the platform out to be a broad-based resource platform for writers across the Commonwealth.

Workhorse’s Yearling anthology gives the Workhorse community an opportunity to publish in a literary journal with known editorial vision. Following in sequence from LexPoMo, it provides young writers in the Workhorse community with an easy ‘next step’ in their training as a writer. Each annual edition includes submissions from 40 authors. The grant from the James Baker Hall Foundation will underwrite the publication and help McCurry to increase contributing authorship and readership.

For more information about the new partnership, please contact Foundation Executive Vice President, Jeanine Triplett at jeanine@jamesbakerhall.org or call (502) 693-3206.

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We believe creating art is a sacred gesture recording the fabric of our existence, with the power to change lives and build community. The mission of the James Baker Hall Foundation celebrates great Kentucky writers by investing in future great Kentucky writers.