Early summer roundup: Reviews, media attention, and author events

Greg Bottoms’s Lowest White Boy is excerpted in the “Readings” section of Harper’s—our first appearance in the nation’s second-oldest magazine. Seven Days, Vermont’s alt weekly, praises the book for its “alchemy of lyricism and down-home telling-it-like-it-is.”

In our first appearance in the Times Literary Supplement, Appalachian Reckoning is called a “vibrant” collection of “rigorous, passionate” essays. The volume also lands alongside books by Colson Whitehead and others on the summer reading list at Bitter Southerner, and appears in The Baffler, Nashville’s The Contributor, and the podcast Reading Women. Coeditor Meredith McCarroll takes to CNN.com with the essay “Anthony Bourdain Listened to the Voices Hillbilly Elegy Ignored,” and the editorial team behind the book continues to be active on the interview circuit. McCarroll talks with WFDD radio in Winston-Salem, her coeditor Anthony Harkins talks with the podcast America’s Democrats, and the two team up for the podcasts Working History and New Books Network.

Ryan Boyd considersHow Humans Learn and the Future of Education” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, calling Joshua Eyler’s book “a splendid repository of ways to rethink how we teach college.”

In other news from our Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series, Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy appears in the Inside Higher Ed preview of fall highlights from university presses. The SUNY Oswego podcast Tea for Teaching features interviews with both Neuhaus and Derek Bruff, author of Intentional Tech.

Jay Cole and Nicholas Haddad’s Beyond The Good Earth is mentioned, alongside other WVU initiatives involving Pearl S. Buck, in an Inside Higher Ed piece by Bradley W. Bateman and Gordon Gee. Cole will discuss the book at the Ohio County Public Library in Wheeling on June 25.

Lambda Literary reviews Jeff Mann and Julia Watts’s LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, “a first-of-its-kind collection of works by queer Appalachians.”

To the Bones is featured in Monkeybicycle and called a “vibrant literary delight” in the Colorado Review. Author Valerie Nieman will appear as part of the Travelin’ Appalachians Revue in Beckley on June 26. See Nieman’s full schedule on her website.

Jacob Appel’s The Amazing Mr. Morality is a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award, given to titles from small, academic, and independent presses.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting talks with Matthew Ferrence about Appalachia North, “a geological, cultural [and] personal journey.”

In positive attention for WVU Press’s history list, Smell and History is deemed “highly recommended” in Choice, and Historical Geography says of Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: “This book will stick with you.”

Keep up with all our summer events, including the July 25 launch for Mountains Piled upon Mountains at Malaprop’s in Asheville, on our calendar.

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