West Virginia University Press is thrilled to welcome Meredith McCarroll to our acquisitions team. As co-editor of our bestselling title, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, McCarroll has demonstrated her dedication to and deep understanding of Appalachia as a region and a culture. In her new role, she will be acquiring Appalachian titles for the press, and we cannot think of a better person for the job! To introduce her, we asked Meredith a few questions about her writing, research, and vision for the future of Appalachian Studies.Read More »
It’s Monday, December 29, 2025. I hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy this holiday season.
2025 has brought surprises—mostly good—and opportunities, which are welcome but sometimes bring their own array of bewitching challenges.
The arrival of WVU President Michael Benson in May signaled that the dust had largely settled on WVU’s 2022 academic transformation. The reset has given us space to refocus our list, rebuild our acquisitions process, and even reestablish our place in the university. This year demonstrated clearly that our future—as a publisher, a thought leader, and a curator of culture and ideas—lies in collaboration and community.
Upon the retirement of our good friend Melissa Latimer, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Culture, the Press was invited to become a department of the WVU Libraries—an invitation we embraced in July and from which we’ve benefitted almost immediately. Expert financial tracking and guidance has been one plus; inclusion in a close-knit community that serves the entire university, much as the Press does, has been another. The Libraries possess a uniquely rich body of materials, an active development office, and a staff of eager, knowledgeable librarians. Together they create a combination that suggests a nearly infinite range of possible collaborations.
WVU’s Center for Resilient Communities brought us Weaving a Fabric of Unity: Conversations on Education and Development, the story of the pioneering enterprise that came to be identified as FUNDAEC (the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of Science). Haleh Arbab, Gustavo Correa, and Bradley Wilson highlight five decades of stories, learning, and insight. The book’s global scope challenged our international distribution systems, but it pushed us to reestablish pathways into markets in Europe, Africa, and beyond. WVU Press books are again easily available worldwide through Mare Nosrum Group.
Operations Manager Natalie Homer, Connective Tissue Series Editor Renee Nicholson, and Editorial Director Marguerite Avery at AWP25 in Los Angeles.
It’s been a year of making the best of difficult circumstances. In February, I suffered a cardiac arrest that required our tiny staff to fill my role at the most inconvenient time: the beginning of the trade show and conference season. Marguerite Avery, Natalie Homer, and Kristen Bettcher—our three full-time team members—rose admirably to the task and accomplished a mountain of work to make strong showings at AWP and ASA in the spring and ASLE in July. Every title in our list emerged on time and error-free thanks to Kristen’s efforts. Operations Manager Natalie Homer kept the bills paid, the lights on, and so much more. Our partners Justin Hargett and Haley Beardsley kept publicity and social media moving while the rest of the team handled everything else.
It has also been a year of connections built by simply showing up—at conferences, readings, book launches, the West Virginia State Fair, the Mountaineer Week Craft Show, and in WVU classrooms. Every time I speak with a group of students—a true pleasure and a welcome break from the daily grind—I receive two or three inquiries about internships. To meet this interest, we’ve partnered with the Professional Writing and Editing Program and the College of Creative Arts to redevelop a formal internship program. Our first team begins this spring.
And in late December, WVU Press began the process of absorbing WVU partner FiT Publishing, a respected publisher of work on physical activity, sport sciences, and sport management. WVU Press will carry FiT’s work forward and keep its existing list in print as a separate imprint of the Press.
All of this activity, all these relationships, and all these plans—with so much creative potential—feel like a return to what a university press’s mission should be. We’ve weathered many storms over the past few years, and it feels good to be upright and moving forward at a strong pace again. 2026 is going to be fun.
Than, Natalie, Margy, Kristen, Justin, Haley, Jonathan, and Raithlyn
Sometimes I hoped against hope that I’d never see him again: Max Magnusson, garden gnome. “Please use the chair, Max,” I told him, since he was standing right on top of my desk. “I can’t have you stepping all over my papers.” He didn’t need to know that the papers weren’t important, but I knew that he wouldn’t be able to sit or keep still. If he had to stand on my furniture, he could use a chair, just like everyone else.
“Ach!” he said, kicking at one of the piles. “Nothing important here.” But he did jump down to the seat of the chair. Did he sit? He did not.
“What’s going on?”
“Terrible things, Jim!” I rolled my eyes. Max was here because I work as a private investigator, and he knows I know how to keep a secret. He had first burst into my office an undisclosed number of years ago, begging me to use him as a kind of surveillance subcontractor; the business card he’d given me—full sized—listed the name of his business as “Gnome in the Home.” The elf, he insisted in later years, must have stolen the idea from him.
“So terrible that you need a bigfoot’s help?”Read More »
This past fall, the bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where I work didn’t hire any new staff. We usually hire new folks in the fall for the holiday rush, but this year, we didn’t. Maybe that has something to do with the economy, or maybe it’s because people like working at the bookstore and don’t want to leave. Last year, when we had three brand-new booksellers (who are still with us) to train, I put my dormant improvisational comedy skills to use by pretending to be a badly behaved customer, so that our new hires could learn how to handle less-than-optimal interactions:Read More »
Interview by Justin Hargett Sadly, mass shootings touch every aspect of our modern life, but your book specifically focuses on educational institutions. As someone who started high school the year of the Columbine shooting, and who was enrolled at a major public university during the Virginia Tech shooting, these specific tragedies still carry such a visceral, emotional weight for me. I’m curious how your own experiences in Montreal weighed on you as you researched the L’École Polytechnique shooting?
I was seventeen when the Montreal Massacre took place. I remember learning about it from the television news at home in the suburbs of Toronto. I moved to Montreal about eighteen months later to study at McGill University. Canadian culture and politics were deeply affected by those events, though, as I write in the book, diverse communities and regions had different responses to that terrible event. My generation of young anglophone (i.e., English-speaking) women understood the attack to be rooted in misogyny. We sounded the alarm about gendered violence and took part in (by then, longstanding) movements like Take Back the Night. In my first year at McGill, I joined a campus student group called “Walk Safe.” It was less political than Take Back the Night—quieter. Once a week, a friend and I made ourselves available to accompany anyone who felt unsafe walking home from campus in the dark, whether from the library or the campus bar. The idea was for students to look out for one another and to take responsibility for each other’s safety. Only in retrospect have I understood that this initiative, too, was a response to the Montreal Massacre. We young women wanted to claim our space on campus, our right to professional and intellectual ambitions, and to be safe regardless of how we looked or dressed.
Working in the archives for the Polytechnique chapter was difficult. It was, by far, the most challenging chapter to write, because I identified and continue to identify so strongly with the young women who were killed there. We were so close in age and in temperament. Like them, I too was a driven, ambitious student, exhausted by early December after a long semester of work. I remember in my bones how it felt to trudge to campus (even if it was a different campus in the same city; even if we studied in different languages) through snow, ice, and frigid winds. Reading the Montreal coroner’s report affected me deeply, as did reading Colleen Murphy’s beautiful and devastating play, The December Man.Read More »
For most of my writing life, I wrote in coffee shops. The steady thrum of people and the clink of cups helped me focus. Then, the events of 2020 brought my productive habit to an abrupt end. Since then, I got married. We bought a house. One of the three bedrooms became my office. I painted the walls magenta, purchased a large computer monitor, stuffed three bookshelves with books, and then closed the door and took to writing on the couch with my laptop.
When we visited Morgantown to celebrate the publication of my novel, Epic and Lovely, my husband and I found the Blue Moose Coffeeshop and made ourselves comfortable. I got an egg sandwich on a bagel, even though the thought passed through my mind: Should I be ordering a bagel in West Virginia? But the menu said it was made at the bakery next door, so I figured I’d give it a try.
Just a few days earlier I’d had a bagel in New York City. I have friends who have bagels shipped across the country from New York, stalwart in the notion that only New York produces worthy bagels. They badmouth the singular bagel culture of Montreal without having tried those harder, smaller, drier versions, and won’t even give my favorite local shop in Portland, Oregon (where I live), Bernstein’s, a chance, even though I think their bagels are quite good. Read More »
Mo Daviau’s Epic and Lovely is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a faded Vegas crooner and his much-younger Texas bride. Facing the cruel timeline of A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects children of much-older fathers, Nina returns to Los Angeles after her divorce to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for those who share her condition. What follows is a deathbed confession written to her physician: a story of love and rivalry with Cole, the magnetic fellow patient who both heals and wounds her, an uneasy alliance with a tech billionaire, and the sudden reappearance of her estranged mother. At once luminous and devastating, Daviau’s novel explores mortality, inheritance, and desire.
The following is an excerpt from the now-available book.
CHAPTER ONE
Dr. Tabitha Chen, MD, PhD, Clinical Director of the UCLA Medical Center’s Rare Disorders Clinic:
I was eleven when you told me to my little lopsided face that I wouldn’t live past the age of forty. My mother, standing beside me in a too-tight miniskirt and platform sandals that made her wobble like a stack of plates, screamed at you, and tried to get you fired for saying such a horrible thing to a little girl. In twenty-nine years, though, I’ve never told you how happy you made me that day. How relieved. How special, even. The news that my life would be short set me free.
I was eighteen, on a routine visit to your office, when you sighed heavily and took my 1 hand—that hand—and advised me to never have a child. That a full-term pregnancy would break my already-broken body. You told me, with love, that I should do pretty much anything else with the two decades and change I had in front of me. So, I did. I listened to you. I’ve always listened to you,
Dr. Chen. You were like another mother to me. And now, you are the mother of the five-pound, four-ounce baby you cut from my uterus hours ago, leaving me to bleed, to grieve, to wonder how it could have been different. These last hours of my life, all joy and warmth and wonder from holding the beautiful rump roast who I claimed as my daughter for mere minutes before I handed her over to you for a lifetime. As you have sequestered me into this plush room in the Steven K. Elwood Wing at Stanford Hospital, with the pink blankets and the view of the campus and the family of stuffed elephants you had sent over, because you remembered me saying once that I loved elephants, I have approximately seven hours left to write you this letter, to tell you what I need you to know about the last few months my life, so that you understand me. This letter is my last shot at being understood.
Marc Harshman, West Virginia Poet Laureate, shares insights into his poetic roots, his deep connection to the natural world, and the unexpected path to becoming a celebrated writer, teacher, and advocate for the arts. With warmth and humility, he discusses the stories that shaped him, the value of regional identity, and his commitment to keeping his work fresh and true to the rhythms of lived experience.
Your early volume Turning Out the Stones (1983) appears to set the tone for other books in terms of a longing to be one with nature and the mystery of the natural world. Can you talk about your sense and value of the physical world in your poetry?
Curiously, I’ve never set out to write about the physical world, by which I think is meant the out-of-doors, nature writ green and, to varying degrees, wild. However, I can’t deny its presence in a large number of my poems. I was raised first on a farm and, when the farm was lost, we remained in the countryside where summer work continued to include farm labor of all sorts, like baling hay, shoveling manure, setting fence posts, etc. From the moment I left the house, whether as a boy or later as a teenager, most of this work I did with an open sky and fields all around me
The out-of-doors has always been a familiar place to me, and so perhaps I can count it a gift that I can be comfortable there, unafraid, and yet can at the same time recognize the sheer power of all that is so much more than my single, small, and mortal self. As I’ve said countless times, including in at least one children’s book, I loved those times when I’d sit with my father on the back porch and watch a thunderstorm roll up, watch its spidery lightning shake the darkness into light.
Spring has finally arrived, bringing cherry blossoms, peaking tulips, and the warming sun. While Morgantown defrosts and returns to its vibrant nature, our authors have been busy bees!
In Enraptured Space, Kathryn Kirkpatrick draws on her own lived experience as a practicing poet to explore how scholarship is grounded in an imaginative exchange between the words on the page and the material conditions of the scholar who works to inhabit them. Kirkpatrick explores this realm in the first book-length study of Paula Meehan, one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets, and showcases Meehan as an original voice whose perspectives on gender, class, and ecology are transforming the Irish literary landscape and beyond.
Here we discuss the inspiration behind Enraptured Space and what drew Kirkpatrick to Meehan’s work.
