Jayne Moore Waldrop author
Jayne Moore Waldrop is the author of Drowned Town, published in 2021 by University Press of Kentucky through its Fireside Industries imprint, a partnership with Hindman Settlement School. Drowned Town is one of twenty books selected for the 2022 Great Group Reads list by the Women’s National Book Association and was named the 2021 INDIES Fiction Book of the Year silver award winner.
Her other books are Retracing My Steps (2019), a finalist in the New Women’s Voices Poetry Chapbook Series, and Pandemic Lent: A Season in Poems (2021), both published by Finishing Line Press. Waldrop’s debut children’s picture book, A Journey in Color: The Art of Ellis Wilson, was published by Shadelandhouse Modern Press (2022) and followed by She Remembered It All: The Art of Memory Painter Helen LaFrance, forthcoming in 2024 also from Shadelandhouse Modern Press. Both picture books are illustrated by Michael McBride.
Waldrop earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Kentucky, and her MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) in 2014 from Murray State University’s low residency program. She practiced law in Louisville and Frankfort, and she’s a former book columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal and literary arts liaison at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning. Selected as a writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers Colony, Waldrop has attended Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Workshop, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, and the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, where she also taught the short story class in 2022. Waldrop is the recipient of an Art Meets Activism grant and a Loretto Writing Residency from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. In 2022 she was honored to teach a writing workshop sponsored by the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Waldrop has been awarded a 2023 Creative Residency Fellowship at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.
Her work has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Still: The Journal, Women Speak Anthology, New Madrid Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Minerva Rising, New Limestone Review, The Paddock Review, Sequestrum, Heartland Review, Luna Station Quarterly, Kudzu, Deep South Magazine, and Kentucky Monthly. Her stories were selected as Judge’s Choice in the 2016 Still Journal Fiction Contest, and were finalists for the 2015 Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the 2016 Tillie Olsen Fiction Award, and 2017 Still Journal Fiction Contest; and honorable mention in the 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology.
She lives on Lake Barkley in Cadiz.