Through a Young Boy’s Eyes: A Memoir of Appalachia in the 1960s

James Franklin Simpson was born at home in Cawood, Kentucky, in 1954. The son of a public school teacher and stay-at-home mom, he spent his formative years growing up in the deeply-forested Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky. As a young boy, James experienced poverty, underfunded schools, geographical isolation, cultural segregation, and loss, all of which served as the impetus for his desire to become well-educated; he earned a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. James was chosen as Kentucky’s School Superintendent of the Year in 1995, by the American Association of School Administrators, and rounded out his career serving as a graduate-level professor at Georgetown College for almost a decade.