Dr. Lee Pennington

             LEE PENNINGTON is the author of 19 books including I knew a Woman (1977) and Thigmotropism (1993)–both nominated for Pulitzer Prize. He has had over 1300 poems published in more than 300 magazines in America and abroad. He has had nine plays produced, wrote the script for The Moonshine War (MGM, 1970, starring Alan Alda, Richard Widmark, etc.), and has published thousands of articles in everything from Playgirl to Mountain Life and Work. Since 1990, through his video production company, JoLe Productions (joleproductions.com),  Lee, along with his late wife, Joy, produced 23 documentaries including In Search of the Mudmen (1990), Wales: History in Bondage (1995), and Secret of the Stones (1998), Eyes that Look at  the Sky: The Mystery of Easter Island (2001), The Mound Builders (2001), The Serpent Fort: Solving the Mystery of Fort Mountain, Georgia (2005), Let Me Not Drown on the Waters: Fred Rydholm, Michigan’s “Mr. Copper” and Sometimes You Clean, Sometimes You Litter: The Amazing Warner Sizemore.  His most recent documentary is Room to Fly: Anne Caudill’s Album. Lee is a graduate Berea College in KY and the University of Iowa.  He holds two Honorary Doctor degrees: Doctor of Literature from World University, and Doctor of Philosophy in Arts from The Academy of Southern Arts and Letters. He taught for nearly 40 years, the last 32 as Professor of English and creative writing at University of Kentucky Jefferson Community College until he retired in 1999  He has traveled extensively (in all the United States, all the Canadian Provinces except one,  and  in 78 foreign countries). In 2013 the University of Louisville opened THE LEE AND JOY PENNINGTON CULTURAL HERITAGE GALLERY which will house all of his works as well as the University’s rarest items such as first editions of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton.  Lee presently lives in Kratz House, a designated historic home, in Middletown, KY with Jill Baker, an artist who illustrated many of Lee’s books. For the past ten years, he has served as president of the Ancient Kentucke Historical Association, a group dedicated to the study and research of pre-Columbian contact in the Americas.