Appalachia’s triumphs and tragedies, its beauty and mystery, and its people’s tenacity, love and good humor have long been enshrined in fiction. This year, the stories of the region’s struggles with coal are reaching a national audience thanks to two powerful new novels.
By Dac Collins Self-publishing is on the rise in today’s progressive literary scene, and quite a few writers in Appalachia have foregone the traditional process of submitting their work to publishers in favor of publishing it themselves. Julie E. Calestro-McDonald…
The Untold Story of Women Who Helped Win World War II By Denise Kiernan Back when African Americans and Caucasian Americans couldn’t drink from the same water fountains and women were an anomaly in the workforce, a team of young…
By Linda Hager Pack and Pat Banks This colorful and educational book teaches children about a simpler time when dolls were made out of corn husks and apples, and games relied more on imagination than electricity. With the help of…
How Global Warming Will Transform Our Cities, Shorelines, and Forests By Stephen Nash As visiting senior research scholar at the University of Richmond, Stephen Nash explores the stunning local aspects of climate disruption. This digestible work employs enough facts and…
Reports from the Front of an Energy Culture War E-Book by the Staff of Environment & Energy Publishing Five years ago, North Carolina veered from being a fairly moderate, progressive state and took a hard right when the Republican party…
The debut novel by Christopher Scotton is a coming-of-age story that takes familiar themes — tragedy and the quest to find healing — and explores them with the backdrop of a central Appalachian community beset by mountaintop removal coal mining.
It’s 2008, ten days after the fall of Lehman Brothers, when 29-year-old Samantha Kofer is laid off from her profitable but uninspiring career at a New York law firm. Within days she finds herself traveling the hairpin roads of southwest…
Rooted in rural Appalachia, these tales feature animals, humans and plants that celebrate country living while being brave — or perhaps stubborn — enough to stand unflinching in the face of hardscrabble realities.
