Michael Kelsay  
 
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Publications

Books
  • Too Close to Call, a novel published by the University Press of Mississippi, in the fall of 2001.
  • Hardwood Heaven, a non-fiction title published by Butler Books, in 2003. Based on the five hour Kentucky Educational Television documentary Basketball in Kentucky: Great Balls of Fire. Principal writer.

    Journals and Magazines

  • "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," a short story that appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review's Spring 1993 issue.
  • "Robert Olen Butler," in Poets & Writers magazine, January/February 1995. The article is a 4000 word profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer.
  • "Except There's No Popcorn Stand in a Book," Writer's Digest, November 1997. A short piece on the relationship between writing and film.

    Newspapers

  • More than 60 book reviews written for my hometown newspaper, the Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, a number of which were picked up and run by newspapers across the country, including the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Charlotte Observer.
  • Numerous reviews and essays on television, as well as longer articles on subjects ranging from tobacco farming in Kentucky to 1980s gay culture in Lexington, for ACE Weekly.

    Study Guides

  • A 12,000 word study guide for Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang, for Thompson-Gale Publishing. The guide is in use nationally.
  • Program guide for Kentucky Educational Television's Signature series, which included a biography and a critical analysis of the major works of each of three Appalachian authors—George C. Wolfe, Lee Smith, and Barbara Kingsolver—profiled in the series. The guide is in use in Kentucky high schools and colleges.

    Other Media

    Television

    • Basketball in Kentucky: Great Balls of Fire, a five hour Kentucky Educational Television documentary on the history of basketball in Kentucky. The documentary covers 1895 to the present, high school and college, and boys and girls basketball. Researched the subject and wrote a year by year outline of the history of the game; talked to historians, sportswriters, officials, athletes and former-athletes from one end of the state to the other; researched interview subjects, wrote questions for them, and conducted many of the on-camera interviews. For post-production, wrote all narration and voiceovers.

    Radio

    Hosted and wrote all the material for The Burgoo Review, a weekly radio program produced and broadcast by WUKY, the public radio station and National Public Radio affiliate on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington. The Burgoo Review featured original book reviews, essays and  author interviews.

    Multi-Media

    Worked with an audio-visual production company and a fabricating company to produce text for displays, a historical timeline, and narration for "sound environments" throughout the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Renfro Valley, Kentucky. Worked with the board of directors on inductee decisions, as well as on questions about proportion—how much space ought to be devoted to particular musicians, time periods, and genres.

  


Awards

  • 1995—Emily Clark Balch Award. Prize given each year by Virginia Quarterly Review for best fiction.
  • 1995—Al Smith Fellowship. Awarded by the Kentucky Arts Council for fiction.
  • 2001—Al Smith Fellowship for fiction.

    Education

  • 1997—MFA, Creative Writing, McNeees State University.
  • 1993—MA, English, McNeese State University.
  • 1990—BA, English, University of Kentucky.
     
 
                     About My Work
     
  "Too Close to Call pulls off a rare novelistic hat trick with dazzling elan: It gives us a resonant and vivid fictional landscape . . . . "      - Read on  
     
  "Kelsay is a talented, funny writer, nimbly working the same turf mined by the likes of Lewis Nordan and Larry Brown."                   - Read on  
     
  "Michael Kelsay brings a fresh new voice to contemporary southern fiction."           - Read on  
     
  "Kelsay's prose combines the best of (believe it or not) Larry Brown, Mark Twain and Raymond Chandler."                                         - Read on  
     
  "The black humor of this first novel is both eerie and down to earth. Set in Eastern Kentucky, this novel both exalts the landscape and makes humorous and human the people who inhabit it."
                                                        - Read on		  
     
  "Kelsay writes like a dream. Too Close to Call is chockablock with wonderful characters and strange couplings guaranteed to offend quite a few readers."                                     - Read on  
     
  "[Kelsay] treats us as children of God, as Cormac McCarthy might use that phrase. His novel Too Close to Call is deeply redemptive at its core."                                           - Read on  
 
 

Teaching

  • 1990–1993—Taught as a graduate assistant at McNeese State University. Classes included Writing I, Writing II, and Creative Writing Workshop in fiction.
  • 1999–present—Have taught at Bluegrass Community and Technical College (formerly Lexington Community College). Classes have included Writing I, Writing II, Business Writing, and Creative Writing workshops in fiction.
  • 2002—Led graduate-level classes and conducted individual tutorials as Visiting Writer at Florida-Atlantic University.
  • 2003—Taught Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky.

 
 
 
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