"Examines both the roots and the resonance of Neema Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, and gun culture"-- "When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes....

"In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, stitching together stories of his unconventional life, from his Appalachian childhood to his globetrotting adventures -- told in his unique voice that combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become over the course of half a century a poet-interruptus, an air force weatherman, a radio dj, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman,...

"1924. Ginger Kelly wakes up in tranquil Cocoa Beach, Florida, having fled south to safety in the company of disgraced Prohibition agent Oliver Anson Marshall and her newly-orphaned young sister, Patsy. But paradise is short-lived. Marshall is reinstated to the agency with suspicious haste and put to work patrolling for rumrunners on the high seas, from which he promptly disappears. Gin hurries north to rescue him, only to be trapped in an agonizing...

"Maggie Thrash has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She's from Atlanta, she's never kissed a guy, she's into Backstreet Boys in a really deep way, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing . . . until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent physical contact pulls Maggie into a gut-twisting love for...

Coming Home: A Stranger in The Smokies While reporting on the manhunt for terrorist Eric Rudolph in the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia, journalist John Christensen becomes fascinated by people in a town hard hit by economic misfortune. His initial assignment is complete. He returns often over the next eighteen months to document their passion and resilience. In a region famously suspicious of strangers, he visits with a soulful country singer,...

The decade of the 1980's marked a triumph for market capitalism. As politicians of all stripes sought to reinvent government in the image of private enterprise, they looked to the voluntary sector for allies to assuage the human costs of reductions in public policies of social welfare. This book details the "savage side" of market capitalism in Appalachia and explains the social, political, and economic roles that mediating structures play in mitigating...

"A broad sampling of deeply impressive writings-essays, memoirs, poetry, letters, stories-by women from the Southern Highlands." -Kirkus Reviews Winner of the 1997 Appalachian Studies Award Appalachian Writers Association 1999 Book of the Year Winner of the Susan Koppleman Award of the Popular Culture Association for Best Edited Collection in Women's Studies Thirty-five women writers from Appalachia define the region in a larger, more...

Beyond the valley's hills that define the mill town of Furnass is another world. A world of rolling hills and fields of wheat and oats and corn. A world of isolated farmhouses keeping company only with their barns and outbuildings. A world of open vistas and skies that go for miles even on a gray day. A world where the land if left untended goes quickly back to forest where the wild things are. At times the life of the farmlands intersects with the...