We look forward to seeing book buyers and other friends at this year’s West Virginia Book Festival, October 26–27 at the Charleston Civic Center. Find us in the festival marketplace, and look for these new titles and special events featuring WVU authors.

Meredith Sue Willis, author of Their Houses, will lead a writing workshop on October 26 at 10AM in rooms 202–204. Foreword Reviews praises her new novel as “a surprisingly tender portrait of the bonds that keep friends and families afloat.”

On October 27 at 9AM Nancy Abrams will discuss her memoir The Climb from Salt Lick—”a reverse Hillbilly Elegy,” according to Booklist—in rooms 202–205.

Be among the first to see Tom Hansell’s After Coal: Stories of Survival in Appalachia and Wales, which Denise Giardina calls “a badly needed analysis of the situation where post-coal Appalachia finds itself.” Hansell is interviewed by Elizabeth Catte here.

The first book-length account of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912–13, Never Justice, Never Peace—written by Lon Savage, author of Thunder in the Mountains, and his daughter Ginny Savage Ayers—is “a real page-turner,” according to John Sayles.

Songwriting in Contemporary West Virginia is a lively overview of the personalities that nurture and sustain popular music in West Virginia. “With Travis Stimeling as Mountain State music tour guide,” says Joni Deutsch, “audiences can now explore the work of songwriters who call these coalfields, creeks, and cities their home.”

Praised by Wiley Cash as “gorgeous stories about a much-maligned region,” Natalie Sypolt’s The Sound of Holding Your Breath is brand new from WVU Press. See the book in the exhibit hall and don’t miss Sypolt and Laura Leigh Morris, author of Jaws of Life, on October 28 at Charleston’s Taylor Books.