Lora Eli Smith is a writer from Appalachian Kentucky. Lora’s family has been in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky for seven generations and she comes from a background of social justice organizing and community building that informs her writing. Smith is currently working on a series of essays on climate disaster and radical hope in Central Appalachia. Her work has been featured in Bon Apetit, Gravy, the Daily Yonder, Nonprofit Quarterly, and NPR’s The Salt. Smith was a co-editor and contributor to the Appalachian foodways collection, “The Food We Eat, The Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables” published by Ohio University Press (2019).

Lora is also a member and co-founder of the Waymakers Collective, an artist run grantmaking fund and community focused on BIPOC, low-income, rural and queer-led arts organizations and artists in the Central Appalachian region. In 2015, Lora accepted the Southern Foodways Alliance’s John Egerton Prize for her work supporting regional food systems and economic development in Appalachia as a writer and organizer. Lora is currently a M.F.A. candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. She holds a B.A. in Individualized Studies from New York University and studied folklore and place-based documentary studies at the M.A. program in Folklore at UNC-Chapel Hill.

This residency at Cove Park will provide me with the time to work on my manuscript ‘Little Winters,’ a collection of essays and short stories that reimagine the tradition of Appalachian storytelling and folktales to address our current moment of multiple climate disasters, a rise in fascism, and the many polycrises now at our doorsteps. This time away from children, work, and school will allow me the space for dedicated research and writing as I explore what stories and future traditions will be needed during these times to survive.