Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.

We're going to be joined by some fantastic candidates, Chelsea Kirk, Ryan Stanford, David Graves, all running for the State House.

And then we're going to have a few words from Willie Carver Jr., the author, the activist, former Teacher of the Year.

He's going to speak about the importance of authentic organizing of rural voters, so really appropriate for the districts that we're going to be highlighting with those candidates.

So again, RSVP, details at progressky.org slash postcards.

I'll be honest.

You know, but it's it's it's hard when, you know, people I have to I was just telling my friend Willie Carver Jr. He's an author and a former educator, a former teacher of the year in Kentucky.

And he posts a lot about he's from Appalachia.

And so he talks a lot about how, you know, we have to be sure we're not making fun of the same people, because when they start, we talk about book bands whenever we know what political party is pushing the book bands.

She created the Immigration Library, donating more than one hundred million books to children under five years old across the world.

Said Willie Carver, "My own nephews were recipients." She created programming to reduce the high school dropout rate in her home county, maintain sanctuaries for wild and abandoned animals, and give poor people access to healthcare.

Dolly's life was one moved by love for those who needed it the most.

Perhaps the clearest example of her heart's depth was her quiet spending of royalties she got from Whitney Houston's iconic cover of I Will Always Love You.

Her heart became one beating for millions, as she explained in an interview in Southern Living, "I have to not harden my heart because I want to stay open to feel things." Thanks to her courage, countless hearts have stayed softer.

And I think Dolly would tell us that the ability to keep feeling, to keep loving, is also worth more than silver and gold, that indeed, it's worth singing about over and over and over again.

Willie Carver is a gay hillbilly writer and poet from Eastern Kentucky.

He is the two thousand and twenty-two Kentucky Teacher of the Year and the author of Gay Poems for Red States and the novel Tore All to Pieces.