This story begins in Los Angeles at Paramount Recording Studios. “It’s not quite right,” I explain to my co-writers. “It needs more authenticity to it. I want people to hear this opening line and feel like they’re actually in the car with me, traveling from Kentucky to Los Angeles.” I’ve been awaiting this moment for a few weeks now, the day that we finally started working on a new album - and genre - that honors my experience as a Korean American from Kentucky: K-BELLE, a blend of my Korean and Southern Belle identities.
On a summer evening in Louisville, a wrestling ring stood in a space usually reserved for quiet contemplation. Beneath the clean lines of the Speed Art Museum, the ropes were pulled tight and the mat stretched flat. As wine glasses clinked and a crowd of gallery-goers took their seats, the atmosphere was one of polite curiosity.
The heartbeat of American baseball isn’t found in a stadium - it’s forged in a factory in Louisville, Kentucky. And a new film by Kentucky to the World’s Director of Strategic Planning and Documentary Film, Tommy Johns, shares the story behind baseball’s most iconic bat.
Fall has always carried a certain magic: a creative pulse that hums through Kentucky’s hills and city streets. It’s the season when the air sharpens, colors ignite, and ideas start to take shape. For Kentucky to the World (KTW), fall isn’t just a time of transition. It’s a reminder of why we do what we do. This is the season of creativity, excitement, and momentum.
Evelyn R. Gregory is a Cinematography and Video Production educator based in Louisville, KY. She earned her undergraduate film degree from the historic Alabama A&M University and holds both a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Science while residing and teaching in Kentucky. She describes herself as “just a kid from Cleveland with a passion for storytelling.”
It’s a sentiment shared time and time again, from news organizations centered on the Black experience in West Virginia to works of fiction based in the reality of growing up Indigenous in North Carolina. Over 20% of the Appalachian population is nonwhite - including Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous folks, as well as many other races and ethnicities - and the region has become increasingly diverse since 2010. And yet, mainstream representations of the region almost always look the same: white.
Allen Sarven ran away with the circus at age 18 and never looked back. At least, that’s how he sees it.
Born in northwestern Ohio, Al was captivated from a young age by the idea of becoming a professional wrestler. As a teenager, he maintained a monthly ritual of calling up every major wrestling promotion he could find and asking for a shot at training with them. Each month, they said no. And each month, he called them again.
The fall after I turned 18, I moved from my hometown in Pikeville to the town of Bowling Green for college. The drive was less than five hours, an easy trip down the Cumberland Parkway anytime I needed a weekend at home. But despite being within state lines, and a mere one county outside what the ARC designates as the Appalachian region, something about Bowling Green felt like I had dropped onto a different planet.
In the early 2010s, this phrase felt like it was on a t-shirt in every store I walked into. Usually, it was accompanied by stick figures or silhouettes of people in a canoe. Other times the shirt inexplicably featured popular TV characters like Family Guy’s Brian and Stewie. Regardless, the phrase showed up enough that 15-year-old me took notice. And despite never having seen the film these shirts referenced, I could sense that they were mocking someone - someone who kind of felt like me.
The one I noticed the most by far is a trope I’ve come to call Degraded - the idea that Appalachians are primitive, degenerate, and destitute. Sometimes, these images are meant to be funny; others, deadly serious. In all cases, Appalachians are positioned as a society wholly separate from the rest of the world - a group that is other.
