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[Audio] MSU Professor's New Book Recounts Time and Travels

Acclaim Press

Dr. James Duane Bolin has written his "Home and Away" column for newspapers across Kentucky for over a decade.  They recount his travels throughout Kentucky and the United States, as well as his journeys in family, social, and academic life.

Now, the Murray State history professor has published these explorations in his new book Home and Away: A Professor's Journal, available now from Acclaim Press.  Dr. Bolin tells WKMS' Todd Hatton that the initial impetus to write the column came from a personal test.

"I wanted to challenge myself," Bolin says, "really to see if I had the discipline to write a weekly newspaper column, to see if I could generate ideas, week after week."

As his columns came out, Bolin told friends that he'd just have to see if the ideas he put in print would run out.  So far, he notes, they haven't.  In fact, he's found a boundless source in his family, his friends, and his students.  Bolin has also been able to draw from his travels around, and outside, his home state of Kentucky.

"Unbelievably," he observes, "the idea well has not dried up."

Murray State University hosts a book signing for Home and Away: A Professor's Journal Monday, April 11 at 6:00 p.m. in the Murray Room of the CFSB Center on the MSU campus.  The Sun Pop recording artist and singer-songwriter Daniel Martin Moore will sing at the event, which is free and open to the public.

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.
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