Two of West Virginia University Press’s books won awards from international scholarly societies this spring. The Politics of Lists received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the Political Geography Group of the American Association of Geographers, and The Argument about Things in the 1980s received the Arthur Miller Institute First Book Award from the British Association for American Studies. Congratulations to authors James Tyner and Tim Jelfs.
Appalachian Reckoning continues to receive attention.
- In WVU Press’s first appearance in Salon, Erin Keane positions the book among a “cohort of dazzling Appalachian talent” offering alternatives to Hillbilly Elegy.
- Keith Wilson’s contribution to the volume, the poem “Holler,” is featured in Literary Hub, and the book receives coverage from public radio and the alt weekly newspaper in Louisville.
- West Virginia Public Radio’s Inside Appalachia also profiles the book.
Kirkus praises the “evocative, intelligent prose” and “strong sense of place” in Valerie Neiman’s To the Bones. The blog Small Press Picks calls it a “thrilling, genre-bending novel.”
Ginny Savage Ayers’s Never Justice, Never Peace—a book that “focuses on how Mother Jones helped miners and their wives recognize their own power”—appears alongside Jessica Wilkerson’s To Live Here, You Have to Fight in the magazine Scalawag.
LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia—”interwoven with themes of home, family, place, the natural world, gender, sexual identity, and religion”—is featured in 100 Days in Appalachia. Contributors to the volume will hold a launch event at Malaprop’s in Asheville on April 22.
Consume This!, a publication of the American Sociological Association section on consumers and consumption, includes a piece on “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Craft Beer.” It’s written by Nathaniel Chapman and Slade Lellock and drawn from their WVU Press book Untapped.
Upcoming events of note include the Appalachian Reckoning team at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Matthew Ferrence at Taylor Books in Charleston, and Valerie Nieman at City Books in Pittsburgh. Keep up with all our events on WVU Press’s calendar.