The holidays have come and gone, and this third week of January sees Morgantown and much of central Appalachia swaddled in a fluffy blanket of powder. Cold temperatures and quiet have descended upon the university city as school eases back into session. But our authors have been active!
Not a round-up goes by without exciting news for Softie by Megan Howell. The Hopkins Review recently published “Apples and Dresses,” one of the stories from the collection, in their online journal. Howell will read from Softie at Politics and Prose Union Station in Washington, DC Saturday, January 25th and discuss the book with Hannah Grieco.
Sejal Shah has been on a roll with How to Make Your Mother Cry, which recently appeared in two major publications. The book was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times in an article about Haruki Murakami and other writers grappling with post-pandemic reality. Renee Simms writes, “In Sejal Shah’s collection How to Make Your Mother Cry, the characters seek their autonomous female selves free from patriarchy. Imagination and fairy tales help them survive. Like Murakami, Shah plays with spatial context, writing in one story that a ‘train station became a chiropractor’s office (Everything was once something else —).’”
How to Make Your Mother Cry was also profiled in Electric Literature’s article, “13 Books by Indian Diaspora Authors You Should Be Reading” by Anita Felicelli. She writes: “Reminiscent of Maxine Hong Kingston or Claudia Rankine’s hybrid work, Sejal Shah’s collection of 11 evocative linked stories is lovely and unusual—experimental without being showy. . . . what is especially attention-getting here is the unusual poetic and impressionistic language.”
Renée K. Nicholson read selections from Fierce and Delicate: Essays on Dance and Illness to a receptive group of current and former dancers in an event with Edwina Pendarvis at Booktenders in Barboursville, West Virginia for World Ballet Day in November.
On February 26-27, 2025, Nicholson will be at East Carolina University as the TAG Lecturer in the Humanities, which will feature both Fierce and Delicate and her poetry. She’ll be plugging the new WVU Press series Connective Tissue in a health humanities event at the ECU Medical School. The series will be featured in a roundtable event at the Health Humanities Consortium annual conference at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA, April 2-5, 2025.
Douglas Milliken’s Enclosure Architect received a terrific review in The Portland Press Herald, in which Tobias Carroll praises the way Milliken occasionally “shifts gears into a gorgeously poetic mode.”
Milliken recently published a piece titled “Pristine” in the inaugural issue of Notch.
Phoebe Wagner was interviewed about Almanac for the Anthropocene on Groks Science Radio Show.
Jake Maynard’s Slime Line caught a great review in Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, where Jonah Walters calls the book “. . . a dispatch from the aquarium’s bloody rim, where blinking envelopes of biomass are disassembled into protein-slabs for the far-away fish-eater.”
In April 2024, Salma Monani gave a sneak peek at Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments as an invited keynote speaker at the Transitions and Transactions VII Conference at Manhattan Community College. This past October, Monani was a Marilyn K. Cory Series speaker at Ball State University in Indiana. She will be featured seminar speaker for an upcoming event at Newcastle University’s Anthropocene Research Group in the UK.
In June 2025, Salma will present “Stories of the Land: Indigenous Ecocinema and the Power of Decolonial Storytelling” with the Learning With Syeyutsus TRC #7 Speaker Series, co-sponsored by Nanaimo Ladysmith Public Schools, Vancouver Public Libraries, and University of British Columbia Press. She has also been invited to contribute to the Page 99 Test for the Campaign for the American Reader blog run by Marshall Zeringue. Visit Salma’s companion website for the book to learn more.
Joanna Allan, author of Saharan Winds: Energy Systems and Aeolian Imaginaries in Western Sahara, recently appeared on the New Books Network podcast, and was reviewed in the German newspaper Junge Welt.
Rob Eaton and Bonnie Moon, co-authors with Steven V. Hunsaker of Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom, were keynote speakers at the Touro University annual faculty conference in November. Their topic was “Decreasing Stress and Boosting Learning: Teaching More with Mental Health in Mind.”
Charles Dodd White, author of A Year Without Months, was recently awarded a Tennessee Arts Fellowship celebrating outstanding work by Tennessee residents.
Terese Svoboda has been busy with Roxy and Coco. She was featured on Brianna Avenia-Tapper’s podcast Writing Stories last December. She’ll be interviewed about the book in an event at New York’s Tompkins Square Library on January 30. Her second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, will be published this year.
Kristen Gentry, author of Mama Said, was interviewed in the Seeds to Fruition blog. John Schila writes that Gentry’s work is full of “lyrical power and grace.”
In November 2024, Kristen gave a lecture at Spalding University about Mama Said, and shared the rationale for its organization as a linked-story collection.
In December, Gentry was featured on the Books on the Bed podcast where she also recommended five of her favorite books.
Eric D. Lamore’s Abigail Field Mott’s The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano: A Scholarly Edition received an honorable mention for the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize, sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, which recognizes the best bibliographic work on pre-1951 children’s literature.
The BSA recognized the “pathbreaking essay by Lamore placing Mott’s adapted text within the context of early Black Atlantic Studies.”
Sadie Hoagland, author of American Grief in Four Stages, has been invited as a featured author at the Virginia Festival of Books in March, where she will champion all of her books, including AGiFS. Sadie was featured recently on the podcast Speaking of Cults and returned to Read Between the Lines with Molly Southgate to talk about her writing process in an episode that will air this winter.
Scott MacKenzie reports that his book The Fifth Border State: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Formation of West Virginia 1829-1872 has received yet another excellent review. In the Spring 2024 edition of West Virginia History, James H. Broomhall refers to the book as a “thoughtful reimagining of the Mountain State” that offers “an innovative re-periodization of statehood and a persuasive revision of the historiography.”
Davon Loeb’s The In-Betweens: A Lyrical Memoir has been featured in a flurry of magazines and articles. Literary Hub included the memoir in “The Annotated Nightstand: What Zoë Bossiere Is Reading Now, and Next,” and Steph Auteri shares in Book Riot that The In-Betweens “instantly became one of [her] favorite reads of the year.”
In South Jersey Magazine, Jayne Jacova Feld and Leob discussed the origins of the memoir and further explored its personal significance for the author.
Ezra Solway stated in Jewish Community Voice that Loeb “contains multitudes” that are reflected in his memoir.
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth’s work Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia’s Mountain Forests was reviewed in the Journal of Appalachian Studies by Brandon Johnson. Johnson says, “Waugh-Quasebarth presents the cultural aspect of luthiery in a way that will linger with readers. The human connections at every step of his journey are palpable, and whether explicitly stated or not, are the actual point.”
Waugh-Quasebarth chatted with Jennie Williams, West Virginia State Folklorist, about his journey toward becoming a practiced luthier. He’s offered lectures sponsored by a number of departments at Virginia Tech, including the VT Department of Religion and Culture, the Appalachian Studies Program, the Department of History, and the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation. In November, he presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Albuquerque, NM.
Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis, edited by Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad, was reviewed by Mark Simpson in English Studies in Canada. Simpson writes, “Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change . . . is impressive in scope and laudable in ambition.”
John Hennen, author of A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199, has an upcoming essay in Power At Work, a union-oriented newsletter and podcast site. The essay, titled “Beyond Hillbilly Elegy: Recovering Appalachia’s True Labor History,” is scheduled to appear in late January 2025.
In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me by Courtney Sender has been published in Italian! In Altre Vite Tutto Quello Che Ho Perduto Torna Da Me is now available from La Giuntina press, translated by Marina Morpurgo and with fabulous cover art by Yuval Robichek. The press has a storied history: founded by the only Italian on Schindler’s List, La Giuntina was the first to discover and translate Elie Wiesel’s Night into Italian, and has since published the most important Holocaust literature in Italy. According to the Italian back cover copy, the book explores “the most daring sentimental geometries.”
Three reviews of Rebecca Godwin’s Community Across Time: Robert Morgan’s Words for Home praise its contribution to Morgan scholarship. Mae Miller Claxton writes in The Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians that the book’s final chapter “expertly weaves together Morgan’s preoccupation with a chosen landscape, science, the sacred, nature, and history.” George Hovis, in North Carolina Literary Review Online, says that “Godwin’s text is dense with nuanced interpretation while also offering a pleasurable read,” and Randall Willhelm in Mississippi Quarterly declares that “Godwin’s achievement is rare in contemporary criticism–a biocritical treatise that demonstrates the life of the author as inseparable from his work.”