June 30th is quickly approaching, but there is still time to enter the 2025 James Baker Hall Book Award. In partnership with Accents Publishing, the award will recognize an unpublished collection of short stories by a Kentucky author. A Kentucky author is defined as someone who lives in Kentucky, has lived in Kentucky, has strong ties to Kentucky or whose work features a prominent Kentucky theme. The author of the winning manuscript will receive a $3000 award and the manuscript will be published the following year by Accents Publishing.

Each year, Kentucky Humanities presents the Kentucky Book Festival in November in Lexington. While the festival began in Frankfort in 1981, the event moved to Lexington in 2017. After many requests for a similar event in Louisville, Kentucky Humanities, along with Carmichael’s Bookstore, is presenting the Kentucky Book Festival: Louisville Edition and the James Baker Hall Foundation is proud to be a sponsor of the event.

June will see the beginning of the foundation’s new program, Kentucky Writers on the Road with two stops around the Commonwealth. The program is designed to take the James Baker Hall Book Award winner on stops around Kentucky to introduce them and their work to writing communities and to expand the sphere of influence for the foundation.

All you poets out there . . . how about this to get the creative energy flowing? Lexington Poetry Month (LexPoMo) is looking for poets to write one poem a day for 30 days during the month of June. The James Baker Hall Foundation is proud to be a sponsor in 2025 in conjunction with Workhorse.

It’s been just about one year since the foundation announced our intention of producing one book award a year to help an unpublished author reach their dream of publishing a book. Seventy submissions later, the judging complete and honors given out, it is now time to party! Complete with buzzards . . . well, sort of. More on that later.

From a very young age, Toni Ann Johnson knew the arts would be a huge part of her life. At 12, she began improv, at 14 she was accepted into the Young Actors at Strasberg Program in New York and at 17 she entered New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. And her love of different aspects led to a career path that took her on several journeys.

From acting, she developed an interest in scripts and how they were put together, Then she ventured into playwriting which led to screen writing and a move to Los Angeles. The move to LA and screenwriting provided a set up of lost control over her writing and a bad case of burnout. She went back to school and received her Masters in Fine Arts and began the journey as a writer.