In a starred review, Kirkus calls American Grief in Four Stages “a captivating debut collection” of “assured, haunting, and deeply empathetic stories.” The volume also earns praise from Foreword Reviews, which says it’s a “terrifying, brave collection.” Sadie Hoagland will launch her book at the King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City on November 21.
Krista Eastman, author of The Painted Forest, is one of five writers highlighted in the “best debut memoirs and essay collections” feature for 2019 from Poets and Writers magazine. She writes of her experience publishing the book: “Then I came upon West Virginia University Press and its In Place series, which publishes books about ‘the complexity and richness of place.’ I sent my manuscript to the editor . . . who began emailing me frequently and thoughtfully, a responsiveness that evoked mild confusion until it occurred to me that the book was being read, carefully, by the people who were going to publish and champion it.” Eastman will appear at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison on October 19 and Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company on October 29.
Newsweek reports on controversies surrounding the Hillbilly Elegy film adaptation, citing our book Appalachian Reckoning, which “argues against how Vance’s memoir depicts the poor.” Volume editors Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll will join James Patterson, Denise Kiernan, Salina Yoon, and Orson Scott Card as headliners at the West Virginia Book Festival on October 4 and 5. McCarroll will also participate in the Boston Book Festival on October 19, and Harkins will appear at the Kentucky Book Festival on November 10.
At Pacific Standard, a roundup of “good, honest, and accurate accounts of the challenges and opportunities in the rural midsection of America” includes John Alexander Williams’s book West Virginia: A History—“the first, and in my opinion still the best, reality-based explanation of what has happened to the Mountain State.”
A Chronicle of Higher Education guide to making smart technology choices in the classroom includes two books from our series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone (“one excellent resource”) and Intentional Tech. The piece is by Michelle D. Miller, whose book on memory and technology is forthcoming in the series.
In other teaching and learning news, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone appears in EDUCAUSE Review, and Jessamyn Neuhaus, author of Geeky Pedagogy, talks with the Human Restoration Project’s progressive education podcast about “what introverted teachers bring to the classroom.”
Never Justice, Never Peace is praised in the Journal of Southern History as “a remarkable product of intricate, careful research that stands as the most detailed history of Paint Creek and Cabin Creek now available.”
Jessica Cory talks about her book Mountains Piled upon Mountains on two North Carolina radio programs: “The State of Things” from WUNC in Chapel Hill and “Wordplay” from 103.3 Asheville community radio. Cory and other contributors to the volume will appear at Bluefield State College on September 20.
Colorado’s KGNU community radio features an interview with Cassandra Kircher about her book Far Flung. Kircher’s tour of the West recently concluded at the Tattered Cover in Denver, a reading named one of the week’s top literary events by Westword.
While one leg of the Far Flung tour has ended, there are still lots of opportunities to see WVU Press authors on the road, with events recently added in Lexington, Knoxville, Wheeling, Fairmont, and other cities. Keep up with all the latest here.