James Baker Hall

James Baker Hall (April 14, 1935 – June 25, 2009) was an American poet, novelist, photographer and teacher.
Biography
James Baker Hall was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1935. He was raised in a southern family of means and social standing, only to have a family scandal turn tragic when he was eight years old. This trauma, and its enduring consequence, would shape Hall's life work as an artist, which began when he took up photography at age eleven.
Hall graduated from the University of Kentucky with a B.A. in English, having studied writing under Robert Hazel among his lifelong literary colleagues: Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and Bobbie Ann Mason. In 1960, he received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and shared the historic workshops in which Leaving Cheyenne (Larry McMurtry) and One Flew Over the Cookoo's Nest (Ken Kesey) were being written. After his first novel, Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings (also written in these same workshops) was published to critical acclaim, Hall returned to his roots in photography. During this time, he became the close colleague of such photographers as Minor White, Richard Benson, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, was a contributing editor for Aperture, and lectured widely on photography in such places as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design, the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
In 1973, Hall came back to Lexington to teach at the University of Kentucky and, for the next thirty years, would act as director of the creative writing program. In 2003, he retired as professor emeritus, having vastly influenced the next generation of Kentucky writers. Notable students include: Maurice Manning, T. Crunk, Patrick O'Keeffe, Rebecca Gayle Howell.
Hall was prolific as both a writer and a visual artist, publishing widely in both arenas. In 2001, Hall was named the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He was married to novelist and poet Mary Ann Taylor-Hall. He died on June 25, 2009, in his home outside Sadieville, Kentucky.
Publications
Writing
The Missing Body of the Fox, Old Cove Press, 2022
Pleasure, Scroll Press, 2007
The Total Light Process: New and Selected Poems, University Press of Kentucky, 2004
Praeder's Letters, Sarabande Books, 2002
The Mother on the Other Side of the World, Sarabande Books, 1999
Fast Signing Mute, Larkspur Press, 1992
Stopping on the Edge to Wave, Wesleyan University Press, 1988
Her Name, Pentagram Press, 1982
Music for a Broken Piano, Fiction Collective, 1982
Getting it On Up to the Brag, Larkspur Press, 1975
Yates Paul, His Grand Flights, His Tootings, World Publishing Co., 1963; Cassell & Co., 1964; University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Photography
The Missing Body of the Fox, Old Cover Press, 2022
Pleasure, Scroll Press, 2007
Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, University Press of Kentucky, 2004
A Spring-Fed Pond, Crystal Publications, 2000
Orphan in the Attic, University of Kentucky Art Museum, 1995
Minor White: Rites and Passages, Aperture, 1978
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aperture, 1974
Selected articles
"Robert," Southern Quarterly. Vol. 40, No. 3. Spring 2002
"Merwin," Field. No. 55. Fall 1996
"Burk Uzzle: The Hustle Comes of Age," Aperture. No. 77. 1976
"The Strange New World of Ralph Eugene Meatyard", Popular Photography, July 1975
"The Last Happy Band of Brothers," Esquire. April 1974
"In My Shoes, Place. Vol. II, No. 2. December, 1972
Selected anthologies
Home Ground: Southern Autobiography, edited by J. Bill Berry. University of Missouri Press. 1991
The Pushcart Prize, VIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson. The Pushcart Press. 1983-1984
Traveling America with Today's Poets, edited by David Kherdian. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc: New York. 1977
50 Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process, edited by Alberta T. Turner. David McKay Company, Inc. 1977
Kentucky Renaissance: An Anthology of Contemporary Writing, edited by Jonathon Greene. Gnomon Press: Kentucky. 1976
Prize Stories 1968 The O. Henry Awards, edited by William Abrahams. Doubleday & Co., Inc.: New York. 1968
Stanford Short Stories. 1962, edited by Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft. Stanford University Press: California. 1962
Selected solo exhibits
Photographs of Wendell Berry by James Baker Hall, Actors Theatre Gallery, Louisville, KY. 2009.
Photo/Synthesis, 21c Museum, Louisville, KY. 2008-2009.
4 Over 50, Gallerie Soleil, Lexington, KY. 2007.
Appear to Disappear, City Gallery, Downtown Arts Center, Lexington, KY. 2006.
Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, Smith Berry Winery Art Gallery, New Castle, KY. 2004.
Portraits of Kentucky Writers, Ann Tower Gallery, Lexington, KY. 2002.
Filmography
Firesticks, Premiere: Collective for Living Cinema, NYC. 1985.
About Hall's work
"He makes our terror come alive – and our knowledge and our joy – in his beautiful singing." --Gerald Stern
"James Baker Hall has consistently pursued in his poetry a trajectory that is deeply authentic. It has produced writing of daring and delicacy, over a period long enough to make it plain that this is not a momentary brilliance but a sustained vision. He has been dedicated to making the language reflect the surprise, the turns and leaps of memory and recurrent apparition, in which pain and beauty are often indistinguishable. This new collection [The Mother on the Other Side of the World] displays an intimate authority and mystery of tone that are the fulfillment of a genuine gift and uncompromising devotion to it." --W.S. Merwin
"The poems are pure, untainted by irony, naked and delighted with being. If there is one unyielding source and destination in all these poems, it is love – people and things worth loving, and the quiet mantra that's always making itself matter. Though you might find yourself laughing or wincing, you understand that above all, James Baker Hall is a serious poet. He means what he says…. Hall is the real deal, the real, beautiful deal." -- Maurice Manning
Selected awards
2001 - Poet Laureate of Kentucky
1993 - Southern Arts Council Fellowship
1986 - Al Smith Fellowship
1986 - Honorable Mention, San Francisco Art Institute Film Festival
1983 - Pushcart Prize
1980 - National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
1973 - Juror's Prize: Photovision (Boston)
1967 - O. Henry Prize
1960 - Stegner Fellowship
References
External links
James Baker Hall Official Website: Archive of photographs and films
KET Living By Words: Documentary on James Baker Hall, Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, and Gurney Norman
James Baker Hall at Larkspur Press
1935 births
20th-century American novelists
American male novelists
20th-century American photographers
Writers from Lexington, Kentucky
People from Scott County, Kentucky
University of Kentucky alumni
University of Kentucky faculty
2009 deaths
20th-century American poets
American male poets
Artists from Lexington, Kentucky
20th-century American male writers
Novelists from Kentucky
Poets Laureate of Kentucky