The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have re-ignited racial tension in America this year, but those tensions have existed in American culture for hundreds of years. Demonstrations, marches, petitions and demands for justice have all been a result of the current climate, but creative minds from […]
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A Kentucky jail has pulled incarcerated workers off litter patrol and put them behind sewing machines, cranking out masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in the small, central Kentucky community. The mask-making program at the Woodford County Detention Center is helping both the region and the jail population, […]
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The essays included in The Way We Live Now are the end product of an advanced creative writing seminar taught at Appalachian State University in the Spring semester of 2020 by Susan Weinberg, an associate professor in the undergraduate creative writing program at ASU. After the coronavirus pandemic caused her […]
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Before the global pandemic hit, small towns across America were dealing with struggling economies, aging roads and bridges, and declining populations. The coronavirus added new challenges, like additional demand for limited hospital beds for an aging population, many of whom have chronic health conditions. Fortunately, as I’ve seen in my […]
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In June, Ohio legislators refused to ban confederate memorabilia from county fairs. The state has long had a complicated relationship with the confederacy. Symbols of the Confederacy have had a bad month. Confederate battle flags will no longer fly at Talladega, there is talk of renaming Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, […]
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As Matthew Thomas-Reid grew up in the shadows of the Appalachian mountains in North Carolina, the difference between being “queer” and “quar,” as it was pronounced in that thick, Southern dialect, was obvious to him. “Older folks would look at me and say, ‘boy, you’re quar,’ and I got that […]
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