Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Gay Appalachian author, advocate, and public speaker
My name is Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. I am a big gay hillbilly. I am also an educator, public speaker, and author, but mainly I’m just a guy who wants to help make the world better. I happen to be a Kentucky Colonel and Kentucky Teacher of the Year too.
I am the author of the bestselling and award-winning collection Gay Poems for Red States, a collection of narrative poetry about growing up queer and Appalachian. I serve as a board member of the Kentucky Youth Law Project (which helps LGBTQ youth in Kentucky with legal needs) and am a re-occurring cohost and contributing board member of Progress Kentucky.
If you’d like to say hello or would like me to speak to your group, feel free to contact me here. Thank you so much for coming.
Gay Poems for Red States
Gay Poems for Red States is a collection of narrative prose poems that seek to give voice to a young queer boy from Appalachia who tried, and continues to try, to love desperately a world that doesn’t always love him back. I am grateful and proud to say that Gay Poems for Red States is the recipient of a great deal of awards and recognition, including being named a Book Riot Best Book of 2023, a 2023 IndieBound and American Bookseller’s Association must-have book for poetry lovers, a 2023 Top Ten Over-The-Rainbow Book by the American Library Assocation, and a 2024 Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Honor Book.
I am proud of this work and grateful to those who respond to it. I have long considered Appalachia as a place plumb flooded with poetry, tucked and strung about in stories and gossip, in our ways of loving and hurting each other, but our poetry isn’t always included in conversations about what poetry is or should be.
I hope to write so that I can do something. In my life, I’ve seen a lot of people in pain. Some of that pain comes from broken dreams, some from not understanding people different from ourselves, and some from understanding them all too well. But all pain, though it comes from diverse places, can be healed. I hope I can help do some healing.
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