If you’re not from Appalachia, Kendra Winchester wants to help you better understand the region. If you’re from Appalachia, she hopes to help you read about yourself. It’s why she started the ”bookstagram” account @readappalachia  – an Instagram account focused on highlighting the work of Appalachian authors. “Bookstagram is the […]

In the early 1940s, as the country was engaged overseas in World War II, Axis diplomats were rounded up here at home and held under the watchful eye of U.S. soldiers, not in prison camps, but often in resorts, like the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.  The Inn […]

A collection of essays, excerpts, songs and poems covers centuries of reflection on the Southern mountains. A native son traces the history of Appalachian literature through 745 pages of a recently published anthology. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands who have read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” or maybe even […]

Appalachia has many strengths and faces many challenges. Some of those are addressed in a new book produced by the Ohio Valley ReSource, a public media reporting collaborative made up of reporters from West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.  The book is titled “Appalachian Fall: Dispatches from Coal Country on What’s Ailing […]

On June 25, 1980, Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were killed in Pocahontas County. They were on the way to the Rainbow Family Gathering, an annual meeting of hippies and other like-minded people that celebrate peace, harmony and freedom held at different national forests across the country. The murders captivated […]

Here in Appalachia, we are, like it or not, voices of a place. I find that so many of my conversations with other journalists, writers and community members explore the myriad ways we navigate and relate to Appalachia. It is a place of baggage and struggle and poetry and loss. […]