It’s 1999; Emme McLean is twenty-eight. Ten years ago, she left rural Kentucky for college, and then a job in journalism in Washington, DC. Now, she’s headed back to her... Read More

The winkingly endearing stories of Nancy McKinley’s "St. Christopher on Pluto" function like a scrapbook, capturing life in a small Pennsylvania town through connected... Read More

In fifteen stories that mine different forms of torment, Sadie Hoagland gathers lost innocence, altered lives, and harsh memories—sometimes with elegiac, bald realism, and... Read More

Edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts, "LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia" is an immersive exploration of queer life within the confines of a conservative American... Read More

Underlying Cassandra Kircher’s intimate and moving essays on nature, family, and adventures in the wild there are secrets: of a beloved father whose silences and rages marked... Read More

In 2016, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy defined Appalachia for many, with Vance lionized as the region’s latter-day prophet. For Appalachians, the book has been much more... Read More

Natalie Sypolt’s "The Sound of Holding Your Breath" finds people on the cusp. Poised on the edge of change, these stories traffic in the ties of duty, trouble, and trauma... Read More

A foreboding tale of longing for solace ignites the rural West Virginia setting of Meredith Sue Willis’s "Their Houses". Dinah and Grace are sisters whose childhood was marked... Read More

Longing permeates Donaldson’s lines, transferring to his readership. Jesse Donaldson’s "On Homesickness" is a lovely, nostalgic tribute to the author’s boyhood home,... Read More

As director of bioethics for the Center for Humans and Nature and adjunct associate professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University, Bruce Jennings writes widely about... Read More

Its pages are sharpened by contrasts—between the dull nature of a regimented religious existence, and the colorful needs of a young girl. In a communal home in a quiet Indiana... Read More

By George, we hardly knew ya. One of the great lamentations of American historians is the dearth of knowledge about George Washington’s childhood. Washington rarely talked... Read More