Sometimes during my wanderings, I would hear an announcement over the public address system for a child who had been lost. The microphone would crackle, then I’d hear “We have a little lost girl,” followed by her name and a description. The announcements seemed plaintive, urgent, important.
East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves’ Said-Songs, a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews, evokes the author’s rural childhood to engage with the poetry of Appalachia, roots music, and the varied meanings of place.
In A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School, Kim Ruehl makes a spirited, independent woman central to the story of the legendary training center for labor and civil rights activists.
Growing up, Justine Cowan struggled with her demanding, ambitious mother, Eileen, a talented pianist who claimed noble Welsh ancestry. In her memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, Cowan explores the grim truth of her mother’s origins and comes to understand their fraught relationship.
In Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen, a collection of essays edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar, 18 writers explore images they wished they’d looked away from — but didn’t.
Thomas Burton’s Voices Worth the Listening: Three Women of Appalachia invites readers into the lives of three women from the Blue Ridge Mountains, allowing them to tell their unique stories of struggle and resilience.
