Fire Is Your Water
A Novel
By Jim Minick
At age twenty, Ada’s reputation as a faith healer defines her in her rural Pennsylvania community. But on the day in 1953 that her family’s barn is consumed by flame, her identity is upended: for the first time, she fears death and doubts God. Fire Is Your Water, acclaimed memoirist Jim Minick’s first novel, builds on magical realism and social observation to offer an insider’s glimpse into the culture of Appalachia.
Appalachian Mushrooms
A Field Guide
By Walter E. Sturgeon
From one of the region’s foremost mushroom hunters, Walter E. Sturgeon, comes a long-overdue field guide to finding and identifying the mushrooms found in the Appalachian mountains. This guide is destined to be an indispensable authority on the subject for everyone from beginning hobbyists to trained experts, throughout Appalachia and beyond.
In the House of Wilderness
A Novel
By Charles Dodd White
After months of wandering homeless through the landscape of Appalachia, a young woman named Rain finds herself part of a desperate family driven by exploitation and abuse. A harrowing story of choice and sacrifice, In the House of Wilderness is a novel about the modern South and how we fight through hardship and grief to find a way home.
Gone Dollywood
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream
By Graham Hoppe
Country music superstar Dolly Parton’s Dollywood is a 150-acre fantasyland that hosts three million people a year. What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America as a whole? Hoppe blends tourism, public history, and personal reflection into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern American identity.
Weedeater
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe
Weedeater picks up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, and continues the story of the people of Canard County, Kentucky, living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and battling with opioid abuse. The events it chronicles are frantic, but its voice is by turns taciturn and angry, filled with humor and grace.
Maggie Boylan
By Michael Henson
Set in rural America amid an epidemic of opiate abuse, this collection of stories tells of a woman’s search for her own peculiar kind of redemption. Addict, thief, and liar, Maggie Boylan is queen of profanity, a hungry trickster. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and strength. Her journey is by turns frightening, funny, and deeply moving.
Counting Down
A Memoir of Foster Parenting and Beyond
By Deborah Gold
When Deborah Gold and her husband signed up to foster parent in their rural mountain community, they did not foresee that it would lead to a roller-coaster fifteen years of involvement with a traumatized yet resilient birth family. They fell in love with Michael (a toddler when he came to them), yet they had to reckon with the knowledge that he could leave their lives at any time. In Counting Down, Gold tells the story of forging a family within a confounding system.
Fall or Fly
The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia
By Wendy Welch
Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through “the system.” The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out.
The Common Lot and Other Stories
The Published Short Fiction, 1908–1921
By Emma Bell Miles
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Edited by Grace Toney Edwards
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Introduction by Grace Toney Edwards
The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective.
Trampoline
An Illustrated Novel
By Robert Gipe
When Dawn Jewell—fifteen, restless, curious, and wry—joins her grandmother’s fight against mountaintop removal mining in spite of herself, she has to decide whether to save a mountain or save herself; be ruled by love or by anger; remain in the land of her birth or run for her life. Inspired by oral tradition and punctuated by Gipe’s raw and whimsical drawings Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place.
Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean
Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia
Edited by Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray
In essays that take wide-ranging forms—ideal for creative nonfiction classes—established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia take on the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture. They write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken.
Keeping Heart
A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine
By Otis Trotter
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Introduction by Joe William Trotter Jr.
Organized around the life histories, medical struggles, and recollections of Otis Trotter and his thirteen siblings, Keeping Heart is a personal account of an African American family’s journey north during the second Great Migration.
Women of the Mountain South
Identity, Work, and Activism
Edited by Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco
Scholars of southern Appalachia have largely focused their research on men, particularly white men. The essays of Women of the Mountain South debunk the entrenched stereotype of Appalachian women as poor and white, and shine a long-overdue spotlight on women too often neglected in the history of the region.
Every River on Earth
Writing from Appalachian Ohio
Edited by Neil Carpathios
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Foreword by Donald Ray Pollock
Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio includes some of the best regional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from forty contemporary authors such as David Baker, Don Bogen, Michelle Burke, Richard Hague, Donald Ray Pollock, and others.
Mountaintop Mining in Appalachia
Understanding Stakeholders and Change in Environmental Conflict
By Susan F. Hirsch and E. Franklin Dukes
Residents of the Appalachian coalfields share a history and heritage, deep connections to the land, and pride in their own resilience. These same residents are also profoundly divided over the practice of mountaintop mining. Looking beyond the slogans and seemingly irreconcilable differences, however, can reveal deeper causes of conflict.
