Welcome!
(photo by Linda Jean Stokley)
Drew, Mississippi.
““I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.””
Delta backroad.
Paris, Kentucky bonfire.
Jump Rock, Red River Gorge, Kentucky.
Elk cow in the mist. Martin County, Kentucky.
Linda Jean Stokley, Anna Kline. Squaredance at The Burl. Lexington, Kentucky.
(SHORT BIO)
Anna Kline is a songwriter, musician, and poet based in Mt. Sterling, Kentucky.
A self-professed Southern culture junkie, Anna grew up in North Mississippi in the small town of Hernando, located between the Chickasaw river bluffs of Memphis and Delta farmlands—an area with a complex history that yielded its legendary food and arts culture.
Raised on a steady diet of three-part harmonies and Memphis soul, Anna explores the world through music, words, photography, and video, facilitating culture & heritage projects and programs that aid in preserving and promoting Southern music and folkways.
She is the Business Development Director of the International Bluegrass Music Association and contributes to the organization’s yearly event IBMA World of Bluegrass®.
She is a Kentucky Arts Council Community Scholar, and her duo, Swift Silver, is part of the Kentucky Arts Council Performing Artist Directory.
Anna continues to explore the diversity of the Southern experience in the Appalachian region through speaking and writing opportunities, sharing stories through oral histories and video projects, and performing regionally.
She recently completed the year-long Poetry Gauntlet workshop at The Carnegie Center and is in the midst of a co-writing album project called Thinking Like a Mountain.
This year she will be appearing at a series of reading events for the Women of Appalachia Project: Women Speak, celebrating Volume 10, to perform her poetry and songs included in the published compilation.
(LONGER BIO)
Anna studied music business and film at the University of Memphis and in 2004, decided to gather experience in the field with famed Southern soul, blues, and gospel label, Malaco Records. The label hired her to work in their music licensing department and Anna became versed in the ways, familiarizing herself with the legendary Malaco and Muscle Shoals Sound song catalogs. Her experience with negotiating and drafting contracts for television and film grew.
Her freelance writing journey began in 2006 with regularly published arts and culture articles in the Jackson Free Press and DeSoto Magazine, soon thereafter, she joined the staff of Portico Jackson Magazine writing a monthly food and restaurant column.
The Mississippi Development Authority, Division of Tourism hired Anna as Special Projects Officer in 2009 to research and write the Mississippi Culinary Trail, an online resource for visitors, highlighting Mississippi foodways traditions and hot-spot restaurants across the state.
During her time at MDA, she worked on many special projects: she coordinated the first Mississippi music showcase at SXSW, was a location scout for the Mississippi Film Office, shot and edited a short documentary food film, and worked on numerous culture and heritage projects including the African-American Heritage sights along the Mississippi Freedom Trail and literary heritage sites.
Over the summer of 2011, Anna had the opportunity to research story segment ideas for the Mississippi Public Broadcasting special television feature The Choctaw Journey, which profiled the history and cultural preservation of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
In 2012, she took the plunge as a full-time musician and songwriter with her partner, John Looney and relocated their Grits & Soul duo to Asheville, North Carolina. It was there they immersed themselves in Appalachian culture and bluegrass, released an album, and extensively toured the Southeast region. They played notable festivals such as MerleFest and Bristol Rhythm and Roots. They were also invited to perform at CountryFest in Belgium and played shows in Italy and France.
In 2017, they moved to John's native home of Kentucky and stayed busy. The duo appeared on an episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (2017) and Anna performed on an episode of KET’s (Kentucky Educational Television) Kentucky Life with her friend, Linda Jean Stokley of The Local Honeys, in a segment about songwriter Jim Ford.
Her freelance work continued to unfold with projects in the town of Prestonsburg, Kentucky, where she wrote monthly blog posts and content for Prestonsburg Tourism and Visit Jessamine in Nicholasville, Kentucky.
In October 2018, Anna completed a Kentucky Arts Council Community Scholars Program certification. This program “trains members of a community in documentation, interpretation, and dissemination of their unique local cultural resources and traditional art forms.”
Inspired by the Community Scholars program she created the Mt. Sterling’s Small Town America festival’s Story Stage, a celebration of community highlighting stories, songs, and foodways traditions two years in a row.
Anna and John formed a new band project in 2020, Swift Silver, and released their self-titled album in June 2021. Songs from that album were featured on Season 5 (2022) on John T. Edge’s show True South on the SEC Network.
She has a co-writing credit with her friend Montana Hobbs on The Local Honeys’ latest self-titled release (2022), “Last Mule in the Holler.”
Anna’s work with IBMA continues to build on her experience in the music industry and culture and heritage training. As Business Development Director, she oversees sponsorship and programming and helps coordinate IBMA’s yearly industry conference and street festival, IBMA World of Bluegrass.
In her writing life, she is an active poet, an alum of the Poetry Gauntlet at the Carnegie Center in Lexington, a published poet in the Women of Appalachia Project: Women Speak, Volume 10. Anna is working on a co-writing album project titled, Thinking Like a Mountain.