California-born but Kentucky raised, Steve Flairty developed passion for the Bluegrass State as a youngster while growing up in the northern Kentucky communities of Grant’s Lick and Claryville, in Campbell County. He relished the family’s one and two-day trips around the state, which gave him short (and happy) reprieves from toiling in the family’s tobacco patch.

Flairty graduated from Eastern Kentucky University in 1975 with the first in three different degrees in education, then taught in Kentucky’s public schools in Clark and Fayette counties for 28 years. He retired in 2003 in order “to expand his classroom” by becoming a full-time writer. He is now a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly and has published two books, Tim Farmer: A Kentucky Woodsman Restored (2005) and Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes: Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things (2008). He is currently working on a follow-up to the Heroes book.

Most Positive Writing Influences

• Michael Embry

• Ron Ellis

• The 2001 Bluegrass Writing Project

• Silas House

• Bill Goodman

• David Dick

• Byron Crawford/Joe Creason

• Russell Vassallo