When a progressive college professor runs for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in a deeply conservative rural district, he loses. That's no surprise. But the story of how Ferrence loses and, more importantly, how American political narratives refuse to recognize the existence and value of non-conservative rural Americans offers insight ......
From the author of This Is One Way to Dance, linked genre-queer short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home. In the eleven linked short stories of How to Make Your Mother Cry, Sejal Shah builds a shrine gleaming with memory and myth. Keys, rocks, ......
Part nature guide, part self-help column, and all love letter to the more-than-human world, Utter, Earth is an exercise in wonder. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach. A light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of ......
Brings together feminist and geographical approaches to the gendered dimensions of various types of infrastructure across the globe. The first book to take a feminist geographical approach to infrastructure, Gendered Infrastructures delves into the complex relationships between identity, social relations, and infrastructure. By drawing on ......
A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.Hell's Not Far Off is a grounded, politically engaged study of the Appalachian journalist and political critic Bruce Crawford, a scourge of coal and railway interests. Crawford fought injustices ......
Essays by the foremost labor historian of the Black experience in the Appalachian coalfields.This collection brings together nearly three decades of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations in the Appalachian coal industry. It shows how, with deep roots in the antebellum era of chattel slavery, West Virginia's Black ......
Grappling with innate desires and LGBTQ identity, a family struggles under the oppressive expectations foisted on them by fundamentalist Christianity. Told through alternating perspectives, God of River Mud chronicles the lives of Berna Minor, her husband, their four children, and Berna's secret lover. To escape a life of poverty and abuse, ......
Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests
Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers. How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia ......
The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in all its complexity, following ......
