Julie Hensley fell in love with writing in her youth. Her mother was a librarian in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia.
In a house full of kids, connecting with her mom over the book she wanted to write was a surefire way to get quality time.
“I would tell her stories, and she would write them down and fold the pages, and then I would draw the picture,” Hensley said. “So from the time I was really little, I had stories that I wanted to tell.”
She kept up storytelling through middle school journals, which turned in poems in high school.
“They were really driven by rhyme, they were really angsty,” Hensley said. “And then in college, I think, was when the flip really got switched.”
From there her passion continued to grow, leading her to write fiction, publish her work and become a faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University.
Now, she’s the 2025 South Arts literary fellow for Kentucky.
The South Arts annual fellowship includes one literary artist and one visual artist from each state in its nine-state region.
Selected fellows receive an unrestricted $5,000 grant, and visual fellows contribute to a group exhibition which will travel around the South Arts region.
South Arts fellows are also in the running to receive the Southern Prize, which earns the winner an additional $25,000 and an artist's residency.
This year’s literary arts fellowship was focused on poetry, specifically with themes of “ancestral and collective memory, Southern identity, racial capitalism, community resilience, familial trauma, feminine strength.”
“I was a little bit nervous about applying this year, because I always think of [poetry] as my secondary genre,” Hensley said.
She was born and raised in Wise County, Virginia, then later in the Shenandoah Valley. She said her childhood and the culture she was steeped in heavily influence her work.
“All of my work is deeply rooted in place. It really starts from a sense of place and the particular pressures and opportunities that place offers for the characters,” Hensley said. “My work does feel southern. I think it feels Appalachian. It's deeply rooted in mountain communities.”
She often returns themes of family, specifically the passing of generational secrets.
“Particularly women, matriarchs and families harbor and hold and pass on implicitly, these secrets regarding things that the public would perceive as shameful,” Hensley said. “Things like fertility or infertility, domestic chaos or abuse assault, especially sexual assault.”
The works Hensley submitted to South Arts for consideration centered on those themes.
“The goal of my work is really to expunge that kind of secrecy in relation to shame, to sort of get these things out there,” Hensley said.
Recognizing literary arts is fairly new for South Arts. This is the second year of the literary arts fellowship.
“It's so edifying,” Hensley said. “I get it that visual artists oftentimes have the expense of materials and the process of creating the art. Literary art it there's costs associated with that too, you know, research, archival research, visiting places, anchoring into the community that you're writing in, and just the time.”
Visual arts fellow, Travis Townsend, can relate.
His sculptures often utilize recycled materials, pieces he’ll hold on to for years before they appear in a piece.
“Some of the things that are in the studio right now that I'm considering new works are actually parts of them may have started 10 years ago, even though that sounds really absurd, they go through this process of back and forth,” Townsend said.
Based in Lexington, Townsend describes his pieces as inventions in progress.
“I think of them almost as like sketches of ideas that are three-dimensional,” Townsend said. “You call them sculptures, but I see a lot of sketchiness in them.”
He wants his work to incite a sense of wonderment.
“I hope that the work has lots of open ends for people to sort of in terms of, like, what it might mean, or what it might conjure in their brains about other things, leave that open to the viewer,” Townsend said.
He wants people to be able to sit with his work and use its three-dimensionality to inspire further exploration.
“It's not just a single flat image that you take in really quick or, how many images we scroll through on our phones on a daily basis,” Townsend said. “You look at it from different angles, and you wonder about it. You look at it from across the room. You get up close to it, maybe even get down your hands and knees and peer into these spaces, so that the process for the viewer becomes very active and imaginative.”
As a visual fellow, Townsend’s work will be included in a group exhibition with fellows from other states.
The exhibition will start at Louisville’s KMAC museum and be on display Aug. 29 through Nov. 2 before moving on to other galleries in the South Arts region.
