return to The Art Of The Rural
Matthew Fluharty
is Director of Art of the Rural and editor of The Art of the Rural
site. Currently a Visiting Writer and a PhD Candidate at Washington
University in Saint Louis, he's writing on "rural modernism" in British,
Irish, and American literature. He has spoken widely on issues of rural
art and culture, most recently at the 2011 BIG FEED, the Rural
Sociology Society conference, the American Conference on Irish Studies,
and the From the Rustbelt to the Artist Belt conference. He serves on
the Board of Directors for the M12 Art Collective.
Matthew's
poetry has appeared in the US and abroad in magazines such as The
Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Grist, The Hudson Review, LIT, The Missouri Review,
Notre Dame Review, Open City, Poetry Ireland Review and The Rattling
Wall; he also co-edited the anthology Breaking the Skin: New Irish
Poetry.
He is the son of a fifth-generation Ohio Valley farming family.
Contributing Editor:
Rachel Reynolds Luster was born and raised in Arkansas and now lives in Couch, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains. She is a writer, folklorist, fiddler, textile artist, and community organizer there where her work focuses on addressing the holistic health of her home county through land-based cultural and economic initiatives. She has several publications under her belt including The Anthology of Arkansas Folksong, which she co-edited, several entries in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and a biographical sketch of one of her folklore heroes, Mary Celestia Parler, in the Overland Review. Currently, she is crafting a dissertation which seeks to apply key principles from ecology to cultural practice, focusing on cultural initiatives that encourage the conomic, cultural, spiritual, and environmental wellbeing of Oregon County, her home, and its enduring cultural traditions. When matters aren’t so heady, she enjoys playing her fiddle, alone and with others, cooking, playing in the garden, spending time with her husband Mike and their two boys, and generally making and doing.
Contributing Editor:
Rachel Reynolds Luster was born and raised in Arkansas and now lives in Couch, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains. She is a writer, folklorist, fiddler, textile artist, and community organizer there where her work focuses on addressing the holistic health of her home county through land-based cultural and economic initiatives. She has several publications under her belt including The Anthology of Arkansas Folksong, which she co-edited, several entries in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and a biographical sketch of one of her folklore heroes, Mary Celestia Parler, in the Overland Review. Currently, she is crafting a dissertation which seeks to apply key principles from ecology to cultural practice, focusing on cultural initiatives that encourage the conomic, cultural, spiritual, and environmental wellbeing of Oregon County, her home, and its enduring cultural traditions. When matters aren’t so heady, she enjoys playing her fiddle, alone and with others, cooking, playing in the garden, spending time with her husband Mike and their two boys, and generally making and doing.
Digital Intern and Contributor:
Rachel Rudi
was raised in Marshfield, Vermont, and is presently a student of
sociology at Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina. In her
early high school days she began singing with Village Harmony, a
Vermont-based organization that teaches community-made vocal traditions
to folks of all ages, and the experience helped her come to see music as
a sort of social barometer, a medium created by and informing our
lifestyles, a way of conversing with a culture. She’s been singing ever
since, and, as a friend said, “just hasn’t gotten around to quitting
yet.”
Community Arts Editor:
Savannah Barrett is a Masters Degree candidate in Community Arts Management at the University of Oregon. She is a passionate advocate for arts access in geographically and economically isolated places, and is in the process of completing academic research relating to the viability of the rural arts programs of the Cooperative Extension Service throughout history. She is currently finishing her graduate internship with the University of Kentucky’s Fine Arts Extension program, working on rural community arts development initiatives in the Appalachian mountains. Savannah hails from rural Kentucky is a country girl at heart though she’s traveled to Europe and Africa studying arts and community building.
She graduated from the University of Louisville with a Bachelors degree in modern culture, social change, and anthropology. She has contributed her enthusiasm to the Kentucky arts community for the past ten years, first as a founder of a local arts agency in high school in Grayson County, Kentucky, and most recently as the Education Manager for the Louisville Visual Art Association and the Creative Director of Salvo Collective. She has exhibited leadership skills at the University of Oregon as the Co-Chair of the local Americans for the Arts chapter of Emerging Leaders in the Arts Network and as the founder/facilitator of the Oregon Folklife Network/Lane Arts Council collaboration to form a Culture and Education Alliance in the Eugene area.
Community Arts Editor:
Savannah Barrett is a Masters Degree candidate in Community Arts Management at the University of Oregon. She is a passionate advocate for arts access in geographically and economically isolated places, and is in the process of completing academic research relating to the viability of the rural arts programs of the Cooperative Extension Service throughout history. She is currently finishing her graduate internship with the University of Kentucky’s Fine Arts Extension program, working on rural community arts development initiatives in the Appalachian mountains. Savannah hails from rural Kentucky is a country girl at heart though she’s traveled to Europe and Africa studying arts and community building.
She graduated from the University of Louisville with a Bachelors degree in modern culture, social change, and anthropology. She has contributed her enthusiasm to the Kentucky arts community for the past ten years, first as a founder of a local arts agency in high school in Grayson County, Kentucky, and most recently as the Education Manager for the Louisville Visual Art Association and the Creative Director of Salvo Collective. She has exhibited leadership skills at the University of Oregon as the Co-Chair of the local Americans for the Arts chapter of Emerging Leaders in the Arts Network and as the founder/facilitator of the Oregon Folklife Network/Lane Arts Council collaboration to form a Culture and Education Alliance in the Eugene area.
Course on Midwest Culture Series Editor:
Kenyon Gradert
is a doctoral student in English at Washington University in St. Louis
with research interests in religion and philosophy, romanticism, and the
Frontier within nineteenth-century American literature. He was raised
on a third-generation grain and cattle farm in northwest Iowa where his
immediate and extended family continue to live, mostly as mechanics and
farmers. Currently, his little brothers and father poke about the
blackest dirt in the Midwest and, when crops are in, fly over it,
cropdusting in their magnificent, yellow Air Tractors.
Notes From The Field Series Editor:
Jennifer Joy Jameson
is a folklorist from Southern California. With a Master of Arts degree
in folk studies from Western Kentucky University and a Bachelor of Arts
in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University, Jennifer has
been engaged in the study and presentation of folk and traditional arts
since 2007 Currently based in Nashville, Tennessee, her professional
experiences encompass museums, festivals, and other public sector and
non-profit folk arts programming on the national and state level. Her
research interests include folk and self-taught art, art environments,
the culture of roadside tourism, contemporary D-I-Y culture, early
country music, collectors and their collections, folk medicine, and folk
belief within the United States.
North Country Series Editor:
Alyce Ornella was
born and raised in the Ohio River Valley. She received her BFA from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has lived in coastal
Maine for the past eight years. Alyce works as a mentor at the
Spindleworks Art Center in Brunswick and is a documentary filmmaker
focused on place-based and ethnographic storytelling. She co-produced
The Eventful Life of Al Hawkes with Andrew Jawitz (2010), a film about
Maine country music, and is currently working on the web documentary
HOME COUNTRY.
Rural Fiction Series Editor:
Polly Atwell is a writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013). Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories and Best New American Voices. Atwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1978 and went to Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan. She received her MA in Literature at University of Virginia and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches at Missouri State University.
Rural Fiction Series Editor:
Polly Atwell is a writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013). Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories and Best New American Voices. Atwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1978 and went to Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan. She received her MA in Literature at University of Virginia and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches at Missouri State University.
Past Contributors:
Ian Halbert used
to read Greek and Latin poetry a lot. Now he only does it occasionally.
Instead, he reads and eats more broadly, and cooks whatever animal
parts he can, especially when he finds some nice piggy parts: bellies,
shoulders, jowls, tails or ears!
Beth Nobles is a visual artist and the Executive Director of the Texas Mountain Trail,
a non-profit organization working on community development and tourism
marketing for Far West Texas. She's a former resident of the Ragdale
Foundation and the Anderson Center for Interdiscinplinary Studies, a
contributor to several blogs and a workshop presenter on social media
for tourism promotion. She can be reached at www.texasmountaintrail.com.
Victor Schoonover is
a full-time teacher of English Language Learners in Rockford, IL. When
he isn't doling out assignments about verb conjugation or pre-algebra
he is painting his autobiography on a discarded window or writing lyrics
about all the neighboring towns with populations less than 30,000
people. While Victor enjoys anything barbecued he looks forward to
experimenting more with Asian-fusion cuisine.