Kim Michele Richardson

Kim Michele Richardson spent much of her early childhood at the Saint Thomas-Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum in rural Kentucky. In 2004 she joined a group of former residents who sued the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth over their treatment there; the case settled in July 2006, with the order acknowledging no guilt. She set down her own part of it in the memoir The Unbreakable Child (2009). Her fiction stays in Kentucky. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, published by Sourcebooks Landmark in 2019, follows Cussy Mary Carter, a rider for the Pack Horse Library Project that carried reading material into the eastern mountains between 1935 and 1943, and draws on the real blue-skinned families of the region, whose colouring came from methemoglobinemia, an inherited blood condition. The Book Woman's Daughter (2022) returns to the same family a generation on and also reads on its own. Richardson founded the Shy Rabbit writers residency, and Eastern Kentucky University gave her an honorary doctorate of humanities in 2024.