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Pre-registering helps us order enough books for our guests and helps us set up the room for safety and comfort. We will allow pre-registrants to be seated first. No one will be turned away, but please note that seating is limited. Please contact the store ahead of time if you need assistance with mobility or other concerns - we are happy to help!

Masks are strongly encouraged to help actively include immuno-vulnerable friends and those around them. Thanks!

From the anti-segregation sit-ins of the 1960s to the 2020 protests in response to the killing of Breonna Taylor, the rest of the nation—and often the world—has watched as Kentuckians boldly fought against injustice. In Resistance in the Bluegrass, Farrah Alexander outlines how Kentucky’s activists have opposed racism, discrimination, economic inequality, and practices that accelerate climate change; advocated for better education, more humane immigration policies, and appropriate political representation; and supported LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, while also celebrating decades of Kentucky contributions to social justice movements and the people behind them.

Resistance in the Bluegrass gives engaged citizens—and those who aim to become more engaged—inspiration and guidance for how they too can make a difference across the commonwealth. With interviews and issue-by-issue action items, Alexander reminds her readers that everyday citizens who step up to make a difference are at the heart of all social change. Optimistic and accessible, Resistance in the Bluegrass is a people’s history and guide that calls Kentuckians of all backgrounds to action.

“In Resistance in the Bluegrass, readers are taken on a journey through what has always been
a part of what makes Kentucky home for many of us—resistance—whether occupying the railroad tracks in Harlan, Kentucky, and chanting, ‘No pay, we stay!’ or occupying Injustice Square Park in downtown Louisville and chanting, ‘No justice, no peace!’

We are Kentucky—the ones who marched
in Appalachia for Black lives, and the ones
who showed up in western Kentucky to end poverty. We are Kentucky—the ones who resist corporate control over our lives, and the ones who are creating the care communities across the commonwealth. We are Kentucky—the ones who are protecting our environment, and the ones who know that healthcare is a human right.”—From the foreword by Rep. Attica Scott

Farrah Alexander is a writer whose work focuses on feminism, parenting, social justice, politics, and current events. Her work has been featured in HuffPost, BUST, and Scary Mommy. She is the author of Raising the Resistance: A Mother’s Guide to Practical Activism.

Attica Scott is a mother and an activist, and in 2016 defeated a 34-year incumbent to become the first Black woman elected to the Kentucky General Assembly this century. She currently serves as a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from the 41st district.

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You can get the book on the registration page, but it’s cheaper if you link below because we don’t pay extra service fees. Whatever is more convenient for you, we love to sell you books!

Mobility device access info:

While our store has ramp access to the right of the main entrance, the event space is more easily accessed by entering at Bayly Avenue. Please call the store when you arrive and we will be happy to welcome you via this entrance. This door is next to a loading zone for easy car access, and our parking lot reserved ADA spots are also close to this entrance.

Registration and venue info HERE

An indelible love story about two very different people navigating the entanglements of class and identity and coming of age in an America coming apart at the seams—this is "an extraordinary debut about the ties that bind families together and tear them apart across generations" (Ann Patchett, best-selling author of The Dutch House).

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential in his early twenties, he takes a job as a groundskeeper at a small local college, in exchange for which he is permitted to take a writing course.
 
Here he meets Alma Hazdic, a writer in residence who seems to have everything that Owen lacks—a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma—who comes from a liberal family of Bosnian immigrants—struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with family and home. 
 
Exquisitely written; expertly crafted; dazzling in its precision, restraint, and depth of feeling, Groundskeeping is a novel of haunting power and grace from a prodigiously gifted young writer.

 

About the Author

LEE COLE was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in New York.

Praise For…

“Scrupulously perceptive . . . Groundskeeping is filled with close observation, detailed shading. It is an absorbing love story, but it is also an examination of class in America, and it captures with sharp insight a moment in recent history.”
—Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“An extraordinary debut about the ties that bind families together and tear them apart across generations--this is a fierce, tender, and wholly unforgettable work from a hugely gifted writer.”
—Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
 
"A coming-of-age story inextricably bound with a love story, Groundskeeping gets at the hard work of finding your place in the world, the burden and exhilaration of fighting for who you might be . . . It's frankly preposterous this is a debut novel when Lee Cole's writing has such ease and authority and his storytelling rings so true."
—Maggie Shipstead, author of Great Circle

“Groundskeeping is a smart, funny, exhilarating debut about that time in life when you are clawing your way to a future that feels murky and impossible to reach. Lee Cole takes a hard look at our fraught cultural moment, our divides large and small, with fresh insight and wisdom and tenderness. I truly loved it.”
—Lily King, author of Euphoria and Writers & Lovers
 
"It’s one thing for a writer to have a great eye and another for him to know what it’s for. Lee Cole’s constantly roving eye is sharp and unerring and it misses exactly nothing. In his debut novel, Groundskeeping, he witnesses with great sympathy the painful passage between youth and adulthood that leaves us all the worse for wear."
—Richard Russo, author of Straight Man

“With brilliant descriptions of the rural South, Cole’s slow burn of a debut novel achingly explores the definition of home, fate, and our shared humanity." —Poornima Apte, Booklist [starred review]

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Irrevocably tied to the Carolinas, these stories tell tales of the woebegone, their obsessions with decay, and the haunting ache of the region itself—the land of the dwindling pines, the isolation inherent in the mountains and foothills, and the loneliness of boomtowns. Predominantly working-class women challenge the status quo by rejecting any lingering expectations or romantic notions of Southern femininity. Small businesses are failing. Factories are closing. Money is tight. The threat of violence lingers for women and girls. Through their collective grief, heartache, and unsettling circumstances, many of these characters become feral and hell-bent on survival. Gilstrap’s prose teems with wildness and lyricism, showing the Southern gothic tradition of storytelling is alive and feverishly unwell in the twenty-first century.

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ADVANCE PRAISE

“Beth Gilstrap doesn't write stories. She creates worlds. Living, breathing, meticulously crafted ecosystems we can walk and breathe in. Around every corner is someone familiar, some bleeding wound that hasn't quite healed, some inhabitant walking through their lives independent of our gaze. These are heartbreaking worlds, but nonetheless beautiful.”—Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be

“These stories are little gardens—the words blooming, the rain too.”—Leesa Cross-Smith, author of The Close to Okay

“Beth Gilstrap is a grand storyteller, and her lush, endearing Deadheading and Other Stories is a marvel. Steeped in despair, Gilstrap’s characters are lonely, wistful folk—trapped, dripping with longing, saturated with anguish and melancholy—who carve out necessary spaces of personhood in the tiny corners of their lives: making coffee, digging hands in the dirt, frying eggs in gobs of butter, reminiscing about days gone by. These characters are terrae incarnate—of this earth, drudged from it, molded and shaped by its rivers and valleys and the winding roads that go on and on, who, yet, are ever seeking, never quite settled. In this enchanting collection—with language and plotting so beautifully crafted, it stings—Gilstrap delivers us through darkness toward a hanging promise of hope, a glinting bit of fortune that might, yet, be within reach.”—Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla and Sea of Trees
 

Beth Gilstrap is the author of I Am Barbarella (2015) from Twelve Winters Press. Her work has been selected as Longform.org’s “Fiction Pick of the Week” and chosen by Dan Chaon for inclusion in the Best Microfiction Anthology 2019. She holds an MFA from Chatham University. Her stories, essays, and hybrids have appeared in Ninth Letter, the Minnesota Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Stream Lit, and Wigleaf, among others. Born and raised in the Charlotte area, she has recently relocated to Louisville.

Jim Warner’s poetry has appeared in various journals including The North American Review, RHINO, Hobart, No Tokens, New South, and is the author of two collections from PaperKite Press. His most recent collection, Actual Miles, was published in 2018 Sundress Publications. He currently lives in Louisville, KY with his wife, Aubrie Cox.

Live in our beautiful Frankfort Avenue events space, join Greg Bourke interviewed by Terry Meiner in celebration of the release of Greg Bourke's memoir. We're starting the celebration of LGBTQ+ History Month four weeks early!

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Masks and other safety precautions may be required. Please follow the event on Facebook for continuing updates.

Catholic Greg Bourke's profoundly moving memoir about growing up gay and overcoming discrimination in the battle for same-sex marriage in the US.

In this compelling and deeply affecting memoir, Greg Bourke recounts growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and living as a gay Catholic. The book describes Bourke’s early struggles for acceptance as an out gay man living in the South during the 1980s and ’90s, his unplanned transformation into an outspoken gay rights activist after being dismissed as a troop leader from the Boy Scouts of America in 2012, and his historic role as one of the named defendants in the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Obergefell vs. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015. After being ousted by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), former Scoutmaster Bourke became a leader in the movement to amend antigay BSA membership policies. The Archdiocese of Louisville, because of its vigorous opposition to marriage equality, blocked Bourke’s return to leadership despite his impeccable long-term record as a distinguished boy scout leader. But while making their home in Louisville, Bourke and his husband, Michael De Leon, have been active members at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church for more than three decades, and their family includes two adopted children who attended Lourdes school and were brought up in the faith. Over many years and challenges, this couple has managed to navigate the choppy waters of being openly gay while integrating into the fabric of their parish life community. Bourke is unapologetically Catholic, and his faith provides the framework for this inspiring story of how the Bourke De Leon family struggled to overcome antigay discrimination by both the BSA and the Catholic Church and fought to legalize same-sex marriage across the country.

Gay, Catholic, and American is an illuminating account that anyone, no matter their ideological orientation, can read for insight. It will appeal to those interested in civil rights, Catholic social justice, and LGBTQ inclusion.