Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Ann Cobb

~NN crJOBB (September 15, 1885-January 12, 1960) A native New Englander, Ann Cobb arrived in Kentucky in 1905 at the invitation of May Stone, a former classmate at Wellesley College. Stone and a fellow teacher, Katherine Pettit, had established the Hindman Settlement School (a school for mountain youth) in eastern Kentucky in 1902. Cobb was so impressed with the fledgling school that she joined the Hindman staff and remained there until her retirement in 1957. Cobb's poetry, based on her experiences with mountain people, appeared regularly in national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and St. Nicholas. In 1922, the Houghton Mifflin Company published Kinfolks, a collection of Cobb's poetry about mountain life. The book's heavy reliance on dialect (which was much admired by critics in the 1920s) makes the material rather ponderous to modern ears. However, scholars continue to regard Kinfolks as a groundbreaking work, and Cobb is generally credited with having produced one of eastern Kentucky's earliest collections of poetry. OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE PRIMARY Books for children: An English Christmas (1978). Poetry: Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems, ed. Jeff Daniel Marion (2003). Kinfolks: Kentucky Mountain Rhymes (1922). SECONDARY Kentucky in American Letters 1913-1975, Vol. 3 (1976), ed. Dorothy Townsend, 77-81. Jess Stoddart, The Quare Women's Journals (1997), 28, 36, 300. Jeff Daniel Marion, Introduction, Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems by Ann Cobb (2003), ix-xi. William S. Ward, A Literary History ofKentucky (1988), 89-90. 123 ...