05/21/2026
April was National Poetry Month, and we celebrated all month long on WMMT’s Mountain Talk, with readings & conversations with Appalachian writers, past and present. But we couldn’t let the month go by without a visit with WMMT’s very own poet laureate: Jim Webb.
Perhaps better known to many listeners as Wiley Quixote, Jim Webb was a fixture on WMMT going back to some of our earliest days on the air in 1985, first as a programmer, and then also as a longtime staffer, working for decades to help run this radio station—and in a one-of-a-kind way. We won’t even try to sum up everything about Jim, because that’s impossible, but in addition to his countless contributions to WMMT, and his larger-than-life presence in our community, Jim was also, for most all of his life, a poet. A book of Jim’s poems, Get in, Jesus, was published in 2013, and after the book came out, Jim did a series of readings from the book all over the region. One of those readings happened in February of 2014, in Covington, Ky., and for the first half of Mountain Talk today, we bring you a set of clips from that reading.
Then, we head across Letcher County, to the Blackey Public Library, which, back in the 1990’s, held a series of readings featuring local writers, called the Blackey Writers’ Circuit. Back then, we here at WMMT aired a series, hosted by Artie Anne Bates, that featured highlights from those readings. Today, via the Appalshop Archive, we bring you an episode from this series, which we first aired in 1994. In addition to the aforementioned Jim Webb, this episode also includes readings from the local writers Jenny Galloway Collins, and Gurney Norman.
🔗 Listen to this episode on YouTube: https://loom.ly/WPsnJCs and/or SoundCloud: https://loom.ly/uQIXYiY
