Appalachian Review

In Conversation: Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Spring 2021 ♦

Interview

There’s a certain amount of defiance hovering between Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s words as she discusses Kin, her debut memoir slated for publication by Bloomsbury in June—and after spending time with her searching, resilient book, it is easy to understand why. Kin recounts her family’s exile from their native Eastern Kentucky…

Excerpt from ‘Kin: A Memoir’

Shawna Kay Rodenberg ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Grand Marais, Minnesota, 1978-1979 Most mornings, the first sound I heard was either a mosquito, tinny in my ear, or the rusty springs of the rough-hewn door as it closed behind my father when he left to stoke the stoves in the other buildings or to wait tables in town.…

2020 Denny C. Plattner Awards

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Blog ♦

Plattner Awards

We are proud to announce the winners of the annual Denny C. Plattner Awards, which were established in 1995 by Kenneth and Elissa Plattner to honor their late son and his love of writing. The awards are given to the finest pieces of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that appeared…

Old Woman at My Window

Elaine Neil Orr ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

It’s six a.m. on an April morning. I sit at my desk before the window, ready to write. The first thing I see are dogwood flowers. They appear suspended like lanterns over water. Eventually, tree branches come into view. I look down at my writing and when I look back…

Joshua 7:22 in the Ruins

Jessica Jewell ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

The whole city was an ambush the summer before we met & I was disaster provisions. I lit fires up and down Meridian, breaking the law every time the moon disappointed me, tried tunneling home dirt by dew & then you were salve and I, a walking wound. I met…

Drive-In Movie During a Pandemic

Matthew Hawk ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

Midweek midsummer night at the drive-in, only one other car ahead of us in line. A gowned man in mask and gloves scans our ticket with his handheld scanner, directs us to tune our car radio and follow signs straight ahead to our screen, where we watch Jurassic Park and…

Queers on the Oregon Trail

Matt Vekakis ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Poetry

to Oregon I’m relentless: on holidays I pull at your shawl and beg you to play settler as the men down- stairs pray for our souls long before we understand what it means to be queers. even the room is magic: austere, New England white, snow-lined sill mapping the cylinder…

In Conversation: Leah Hampton

Annie Frazier ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Interview

Leah Hampton’s first book, F*ckface and Other Stories, was released in July 2020. The twelve powerful, funny, tragic, and surprising stories are set in towns across the Appalachian South—from Western North Carolina to Eastern Kentucky to West Virginia to Tennessee and beyond—and are populated with complex and complicating modern Southern…

Cattle Upon a Thousand Hills

Martha Grace Duncan ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

I. Barn Burning Wood and hay kin burn. —William Faulkner I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. “I think you kind of enjoyed it,” she told me later. “The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the…

The Trouble With Snakes

Monica Brashears ♦

Winter 2021 ♦

Fiction

I ain’t got much to say but the truth. I swear by God, President Kennedy, by each of my ten toes and every Tennessean sunset—I ain’t got it in me to hurt nobody. I only know that what I been doing would put my mama to tears. You acting out, my…