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Fiction
With a Hammer for My Heart
University Press of Kentucky
0813191750, $16.00 paper, for teens and adults
ISBN-13: 978-0813191751
Reissued in June 2007 as part of the Kentucky Voices series.
“A rich tale of healing, redemption, and social responsibility.” — Publishers Weekly
“Lyon gives readers a story rich in precise, gorgeous language that glows like a sword on the forge and cuts as deep. . . . Tragedies old and new weave a tiny Kentucky town into the center of the universe.” — starred review, Booklist
"The dialogue in this wonderful story is moving, often funny, and always true to life." — School Library Journal
"With her poet's pen, Lyon has fashioned as fine and moving a love story as you'll ever read, just about as strange and wonderful as life itself. Filled with passion, pain, and redemption, this novel is a classic." —Lee Smith
"With a love of language that comes from the heart of a people, George Ella Lyon has plunged right into the souls of a wide range of characters who are tender, human, funny and true." — Bobbie Ann Mason
Awards
Poetry
Back: Poems
Wind Publications, 2010
978-1893239982, $15.00 paperback, for adults
“George Ella Lyon is a master storyteller. In this collection of poetry, the voice of each poem’s narrator is as close as a companion’s breath in our ear. The lives she offers up in the chalice of this book are a communion of spirits with all their laments and stark truths, a part of the liquor of life from which we all drink – bitter, ephemeral, beautiful.” - Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters and Dreams of Isis: A Woman’s Spiritual Sojourn
“'I contain multitudes,' Walt Whitman wrote. He didn't know the half of it. George Ella Lyon's new poems, Back, contain the voices of girls and boys, women and men from other times and places. "I is someone else," Rimbaud wrote, but miraculously George Ella Lyon is both herself and "someone else" – in detail, with heart, in songs that are utterly convincing and always sonorous. This collection is a visionary work, taking us out of our petty and narrow selves, transporting us into the stream of what it means to be human – from within other souls and skins. In tribal cultures, George Ella Lyon would have been a shaman or a medicine woman with these healing songs. In our culture, she's a poet – a real poet, one whose song liberates us from the confines of the ego, This ability to live in mystery is Positive Capability, and George Ella Lyon possesses this genius in spades.” - Marilyn Kallet, author of Packing Light: New and Selected Poems and director, creative writing program, University of Tennessee.
“In Back poet George Ella Lyon conducts us on a journey of spiritual exploration and transcendence, convincingly invoking the anonymous voices of our recent and ancient tribal past – among them a Gypsy, a Buddhist boy, a Sioux woman – in a series of monologues that embody our common experience as humans. In this mosaic she finds a composite voice that recreates our shared destiny of mystery and hope, "a web," as one of her voices tells us, "of my life's weaving." These are fine poems.” - Richard Taylor, author of Stone Eye and Girty.
Where I'm From, Where Poems Come From
Absey and Co., 1999
0-888-84212-1, $13.95 hardcover, for adults
A hands-on poetry workshop
“This guide to poetry writing carries a simple
message: You have within you everything you need to write.” - The Riverbank Review
“Novice poets will appreciate Lyon's encouragement and
enthusiasm for a challenging genre.” - Booklist
“This combination memoir and how-to by a well-known children's book author will attract anyone interested in the creative writing process.” - Booklist 'Crossovers: Children's Books for Adults'
“This combination of memoir and writing guide is inspiring and thought provoking. A delicious read!”
- Kristine O'Connell George
Awards:
- NY Public Library Best Book for the Teenage
Catalpa
Wind Publications 1993, reissued in 2007 with an introduction by Robert West
0-96365452-7, $15.00 paperback, for adults
“Lyon is never trivial; she writes of things that matter - birth, death, family, community...her metaphors are always vivid and fresh, and often brilliant...Lyon's poems are visions to which art has given voice. ” - Jim Wayne Miller
“Modest and unpretentious...Whether she is describing her forebears, her children, or the life of her beloved Virginia Woolf, her ear is perfect, impeccable, full of lyric music.” - Ruth Whitman
“Lyon's poems offer many gifts, but a focus on the search for ancestry seems to me the unique gift of Catalpa. This searching begins locally and reaches beyond the bonds that unite us all, Appalachian and non-Appalachian, man and woman, to the essence of our common humanity. Here we discover lives brought forth in words, "'no waste and no hurry...tough as a poem for the burden that outlasts us, for a heart leaved with words like a tree.” - Jeff Daniel Marion
“Catalpa will read you the riddle of family, of memory, of Oaksie Caudill and Virginia Woolf, of Red Bird Mission and the Air Force Museum, of searching 'way up the chromosome chain' for your mothers and fathers...Like leaves on a tree, these gentle, accurate poems will delight eye and ear; like leaves on a tree, they are both seeming-simple and intricately veined, each one individual yet part of a whispering, mantic whole.” - Jane Wilson Joyce
Awards:
- Winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year Award
Old Wounds, New Words: Poems from the Appalachian Poetry Project
Edited by Bob Henry Baber, George Ella Lyon, and Gurney Norman
The Jesse Stuart Foundation
0-945084-44-7, $10.00 hardcover, for adults
Choices: Stories for Adult New Readers
University Press of Kentucky 1989
0-8131-0900-0, $4.95 paperback, for adults
“I don't agree with all the choices people make,” says
the author. “You probably won't either. My job is to
let them tell their stories.” And so she does in these
thirteen warm, funny, and sad short stories about
people making hard decisions for themselves and for
their families:
— Like Iona, who accidentally accepts a marriage proposal.
— And Daryll, just about to graduate from high school, whose mother is eager for him to “make
something” of himself.
— And Lexie and Jeb, deep in debt and already struggling to feed their six children, who find out a
seventh is on the way.
Memoir
Don't You Remember?
Motes Books
0-9778745-6-7, $17.00 paper, for adults
In Don't You Remember? poet, novelist and children's writer George Ella Lyon investigates a childhood experience in which she seemed to have uncovered memories
from another lifetime. Her decades-long search takes her back to the town where the 'memories' surfaced, through libraries and archives, to past-life therapy, and eventually to Wales. Part mystery, part a study of the creative process, Don't You Remember? leads the reader deep into essential questions about who and how we are.
“This is a gorgeous and deeply unsettling book...[Lyon] lays it all out, allowing us to see and draw our own conclusions. What she also does is write with passionate clarity about the life of stories and the telling of lives, about what writers do and how they work.” — Booklist
Collections
Harvest of Fire: New and Collected Work
by Lee Howard, Edited by George Ella Lyon
Motes Books, 2010
Lee Howard was an original. Tormented by her past, courageous in her lifetime, she chiseled lasting words of hard-won truth into modern Appalachia's literary bedrock. Lee Howard's work, too much of it left unpublished until now, is a crucial piece of heritage. Her method had a profound impact on many of the region's most beloved (and better-known) authors.
This definitive collection of Lee's published and unpublished works, edited by her colleague George Ella Lyon, proves Lee Howard's genius, her ear for language, and her love for the place of her birth, in spite of the hurt it handed her.
Here are the speech and storytelling traditions of the rural South, served up like a home-cooked meal for all the world to savor.
A Kentucky Christmas
University Press of Kentucky 2003
Edited by George Ella Lyon
0-813-12279-1, $28.00 hardcover, for adults
A Kentucky Christmas is a celebration of holiday poetry, fiction, essays, recipes, and songs by more than fifty of the Bluegrass state's finest writers.
Gathered here are yuletide writings from some of the legendary voices of Kentucky — and the nation — as well as original Christmas stories and poetry from some of the state's emerging talents. A delight for anyone interested in Kentucky literature, history, or traditions, A Kentucky Christmas promises to be a wonderful holiday gift, a treasured family keepsake, and a necessary addition for libraries and for personal collections.
“In A Kentucky Christmas, readers get a gigantic gift full of literary goodies — some 337 pages — under their tree...This is a heartfelt present we have made ourselves and that is usually the best kind.”
- Steve Flairty, Kentucky Monthly
“Lyon's collection, distinguished by its literary quality and transcendence of the mawkish diction that so often defines holiday give books, is superb.” - L. Elisabeth Beattie, Lexington Herald-Leader
 Crossing Troublesome: Twenty-Five Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop
Edited by Leatha Kendrick and George Ella Lyon
Preface by Robert Morgan
Wind Publications, 2002
1-893239-07-1, $18.00 paperback, for adults
Plays
These have seen numerous productions; excerpts have been published in literary journals.
- Braids, 1985
- Looking Back for Words, with music by Steve Lyon, 1988
- Sonny's House of Spies
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