Gurney Norman

1937 - 2025

Gurney Musick Norman died peacefully at the age of 88 on October 12, 2025, in Lexington, KY, from natural causes. Born on July 22, 1937, in Grundy, VA, to the late Howard Arthur Norman and Thelma Musick Norman, Gurney grew up in the southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky and southwest Virginia. He was raised alternately by his maternal grandparents, Rufus Franklin Musick and Mary Kirk Musick of Pennington Gap, VA, and his paternal grandparents, Gurney Wesley Norman and Flora Bell Lewis of Hazard, KY.

From the age of nine until eighteen, he was a boarding student at Stuart Robinson School in Letcher County, KY, where he received his high school diploma in 1955. He graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1959 with a degree in journalism and English. In 1960, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, then served two years in the U.S. Army from 1961 to 1963 as a First Lieutenant, earning his parachute badge. After the Army, he returned to eastern Kentucky to work as a reporter for his hometown newspaper, The Hazard Herald. Leaving newspaper work to concentrate on his fiction writing, he took a job with the U.S. Forest Service as a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon in the summers of 1966 and 1967.

Gurney was the author of four books: Divine Right's Trip, first published in The Last Whole Earth Catalog; Kinfolks; Ancient Creek; and Allegiance. He co-edited two essay collections: Back Talk: Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes and An American Vein: Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature. He was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kentucky, where he taught from 1979 until his retirement in 2022. In the late 1980s, he wrote and presented three films for Kentucky Educational Television with director John Morgan, and in the 1990s, three short films based on Kinfolks were made by Andrew Garrison. He co-founded Old Cove Press with Nyoka Hawkins in 1999. He served as Kentucky Poet Laureate, 2009–2010, and was awarded an honorary degree from Berea College in 2011. In 2019, he was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2021 he was inducted into the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

Gurney is survived by his wife, Nyoka Hawkins; his sister, Gwynne Norman Griffith; nieces Linda Carrington, Susan Gadd, Lindsay Hawkins, and Sharon Sapienza; and a large, extended, loving family and community. He was preceded in death by his brother, Jerry Lewis Norman, and his brother-in-law, Kenneth Griffith.

A memorial to honor his life and work will be held on December 6 and 7, 2025, at the University of Kentucky Gatton Student Center. The memorial will be open to the public, and both days will be live-streamed. Donations in his honor may be made to the Gurney Norman Appalachian Student Award Gift Fund at the University of Kentucky.