Georgia Green Stamper

Georgia Green Stamper is a seventh generation Kentuckian who grew up on an Owen County tobacco farm that has belonged to one member or another of her family for almost two centuries. She still owns the land, and a sense of that place and of her family runs throughout her writing. Small Acreages is her third collection of connected creative non-fiction essays and completes a loosely connected trilogy that began in You Can Go Anywhere and continued with Butter in the Morning. Small Acreages was named one of ten titles Longlisted for PENAMERICA’S 2023 Award for the Art of the Essay. The Carnegie Center included Small Acreages in its 2022-23 Kentucky Great Writers Reading Series – an honor that both of her earlier books also received in their respective years of publication. Stamper and her husband Ernie live in Lexington.

Small Acreages cover

Small Acreages

Small Acreages completes a trilogy of connected essays told in Georgia Green Stamper's unique Kentucky voice. In Small Acreages, readers are returned to Stamper's Eagle Creek world and its colorful characters, but her voice has both deepened with time and widened to include her journey beyond Natlee. Many of the essays in this new collection are reflective or as Stamper phrases it, she hopes "to add a handful of words to the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human." Her wry humor endures, however, popping into even the most poignant of pieces, grounding her, cutting through the absurd as her daddy taught her to do, reminding her as her mother did that "you might as well laugh." 

Small Acreages introduces new essays to her readers and collects some of Stamper's most requested and popular essays from her earlier books. Returning readers will not be disappointed as they reconnect with Stamper's unique world. New readers will delight in discovering this authentic Kentucky voice. Both will find her voice true as she weaves effortlessly between the lyrical to the vernacular, from sublime topics to the mundane. With wisdom and humor and compassion, Stamper reminds all readers that if we strive to unite with the universe, we must pay attention to the "small acreages that have been entrusted to us" for safekeeping.