Appalachian Review

In Conversation: bell hooks and Laverne Cox

bell hooks ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Featured Author, Interview

Originally published in November 2015. Earlier this spring, bell hooks invited the award-winning actress, producer, and advocate Laverne Cox to speak at the private opening of The bell hooks Institute, a new center in Berea dedicated to critical thinking and contemplating the intersectional issues of race, gender, and class. The…

Night in the Burned House

Lucien Darjeun Meadows ♦

Fall 2015 ♦

Poetry

In my old bedroom, in this house now my Aunt A’s, walls mottle grey into black, char hiding that this room was ever painted purple in a hope that someone would guess, would know. Burning night, my hidden journals blown across the field—and my aunt, gathering boughs for wreaths, found…

Pushcart Prize Nominees Announced

Dylan Mullins ♦

Blog ♦

Pushcart

Appalachian Heritage is proud to announce its 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees: Wiley Cash: “When You Say ‘Home'” (Fiction, Spring issue) Lucien Darjeun Meadows: “Night in the Burned House” (Poem, Fall issue) Beth Newberry: “The Curve of the Smoke” (CNF, Fall issue) Natalie Sypolt: “Stalking the White Deer” (Fiction, Spring issue)…

Memorate

Christie Collins ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

The field. Light. Morning. Then, my father, uncle. Apples, everywhere. In boxes, in palms, in teeth. Apples, everywhere. The black mare. Wild. The black mare that dawned from the mountain. Wild. The rough sketches of my earliest memory. My father places me on the back of the beast & we…

Jean Ritchie (1922-2015)

Loyal Jones ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Special Feature

I first met Jean Ritchie about seventy years ago at Brasstown, North Carolina, where I grew up and where her sisters Mae and Edna were at the John C. Campbell Folk School. Just a few years later, as a foreign-lander-soldier, I found a copy of Singing Family of the Cumberlands…

Summer 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

During their panel discussion titled “Voice Lessons” at the 2015 Appalachian Studies Association Conference, writers and teachers Darnell Arnoult, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Amanda Jo Runyon, and Jessie van Eerden offered their thoughts on voice in creative writing. They talked of the vital voices that have shaped their work over the…

Hateful

Pauletta Hansel ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Poetry

my Granny said, her pleated velvet cheeks aquiver as we watched the battered Fords and coal trucks splatter gravel from the road above the porch. That’s one thing I can’t abide. I don’t remember who it was or what he did that made my Granny spit his name like chaw…

Interview: Jessie van Eerden

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Interview

Jessie van Eerden’s speaking voice is gentle, inviting, smooth as a creek stone. She’s reading of prayers, of a woman wearing a black slip and smoking Pall Malls, of the “cloud of witnesses” from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, and her listeners are entranced, transported far from this dull…

The Long Weeping

Jessie van Eerden ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Creative Nonfiction, Special Feature: Voice Lessons

I stand at the hand pump in the grove, young, maybe ten, having run from the signs of dying. Under the small shingled roof on the cement slab, the iron pump is smudged by creatures that licked it in the night, coons and cats and the rumored black bear. My…

Fiction: The Attack

Darnell Arnoult ♦

Summer 2015 ♦

Fiction, Special Feature: Voice Lessons

An excerpt from The Nine Lives of Loody Tibbett, a novel in progress Day 1 Iron. Sodium. Lightning. Wind. Stars. Day 10 There’s a flap and roll to it, the kind of soft thunder you hear when you hang sheets on the line and a strong wind comes while you’re…