Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel Trampoline. His second novel, Weedeater, was published in 2018 and his third, Pop, ​was published in 2021. Gipe’s work as a writer grew out of his work as a community college teacher and arts organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky. Gipe will talk about how his life as an organizer and teacher enabled his life as a writer and how he has meshed the different parts of his professional life in the six years since his first novel was published.

Tickets are only $5 and can be reserved online or by calling 859-236-4054.

The 2022 Lunch with the Arts Cultural Connections series is funded in part by Kentucky Humanities and was designed to enhance our community’s experience of our winter exhibit. Appalachia from the Inside: Celebrating Kentucky’s Appalachian Art and Culture will be on exhibit from January 13th through March 16th.