Nominated and featured into the finals of the 2012 Shanghai Tunnels Project International Video Poetry Festival and China's 2012 JUE Arts + Music Festival.
An African American Miner, Bud Townes is credited with saving the survivors of the Belva-Straight Creek Mine disaster. The all white group of Miners refused to go to the hospital unless Townes went to the same one, thus desegregating the Bell County Kentucky hospital in January 1946.