Titles from WVU Press appear on year-end bestseller lists from City of Asylum Bookstore in Pittsburgh (where The Secret Lives of Church Ladies lands at #1) and at WordPlay in Wardensville, WV (where LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia and Appalachian Reckoning are in the year’s top 20). Many thanks to all the independent booksellers who joined in our success in 2021!

Publishers Weekly has the first published review of Jason Kapcala’s Hungry Town: “With the grit of a western and the crackle of a murder mystery, this finely wrought effort delivers the goods.” Kapcala will launch the book at an event hosted by the WVU Humanities Center and the WVU Leadership Studies Department on February 28.

The Los Angeles Review of Books talks with Joe Trotter, saying he “has helped reshape thinking on class and race in American history.” Trotter’s book African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry is new from WVU Press.

Neema Avashia’s memoir-in-essays Another Appalachia (“defying Appalachian stereotypes, her lessons about class, race, gender, and sexuality begin in childhood”) is anticipated on Autostraddle‘s list of queer and feminist books for winter 2022. The author talks with the Queer Everything podcast.

Tom Beers, editor of Kirkus, praises Deesha Philyaw’s book in Passport Magazine: “We’re definitely seeing more diverse fiction published by houses big and small, especially great stuff from Black writers, many of them debuts. In the past year alone, I’ve loved Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” Philyaw is featured on the Craft Talk blog, where Jami Attenberg predicts her fiction “will be taught ten years from now.” City Paper covers Philyaw’s participation, alongside Brian Broome and Damon Young, in the Pittsburgh Racial Justice Summit.

Literary Hub features Andrew Keen’s interview with Kate Daniels about her book Slow Fuse of the Possible. Daniels’s launch event at New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville receives coverage in the Augusta Free Press.

The How Do You Write podcast talks with Renée Nicholson, author of Fierce and Delicate. Nicholson’s book is named to the longlist for the JOURNEY Award for Overcoming Adversity in Narrative Nonfiction.

Matthew Ferrence’s Appalachia North is praised as “beautifully written” in Pennsylvania History.

William H. Turner, author of The Harlan Renaissance, appears on “The Black Eagle” from SiriusXM’s UrbanView, and is interviewed in Notre Dame Magazine.

Public radio station WBUR in Boston cites our book Ungrading in a piece on the movement to address student trauma by going gradeless. Author Susan D. Blum is interviewed for the Teaching for Success podcast.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an investigation into “Why the Science of Teaching Is Often Ignored” talks with Sarah Rose Cavanagh and Joshua Eyler, mentioning their books with WVU Press.

And in other news from our higher education series, Jessamyn Neuhaus is interviewed on the podcast from the New Books Network, where her book Geeky Pedagogy is called a “funny and pragmatic guide.”

Don’t miss new winter and spring events on our calendar, including Kate Daniels at Vanderbilt University and Neema Avashia at Brookline Booksmith in Boston.