Appalachian Review

Rhiannon Giddens’s New Album

Dylan Mullins ♦

Blog ♦

Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops recently debuted her solo album Tomorrow is My Turn. The Carolina Chocolate Drops is an old-time string band from Durham, North Carolina. Their 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig, won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards, and…

“Pain Pills” by Angaleena Presley

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Blog ♦

Eastern Kentucky native Angaleena Presley‘s debut solo album, American Middle Class, was released in 2014 to widespread praise, following a career of songwriting and hit-making with country supergroup The Pistol Annies. Here’s a twangy track titled “Pain Pills.”

David Joy’s Appalachian Heritage Playlist

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Blog ♦

David Joy‘s debut novel Where All the Light Tends to Go hit the shelves earlier this month. To mark its publication, he has curated a playlist of songs that have inspired and influenced his writing for Appalachian Heritage readers to enjoy. Happy listening.

2014 Denny C. Plattner Awards

Dylan Mullins ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Plattner Awards

Appalachian Heritage is proud to announce the winners of the 2014 Denny C. Plattner Awards, presented to the authors of the work deemed by our judges to be the best pieces of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that appeared in the magazine last year. The winners receive a $200 award and…

Winter 2015 Editor’s Note

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Editor's Note

In the dead of winter, sunlight is often in short supply, appearing without warning, only to soon disappear again behind a mass of grey clouds. Many of us can’t help but walk around downcast, wearing what Shakespeare called a “February face” in Much Ado About Nothing—“So full of frost, of…

Kentucky Writers in Kentucky: A Special Feature by Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Special Feature

In the spring of 1964, Tanya and I and our children had been living in New York for two years. When my work in the city ended that spring, we loaded ourselves and our belongings into a Volkswagen Beetle with a luggage rack on top and took the New Jersey…

Interview: David Joy

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Interview

David Joy is only thirty-one, but come March, this North Carolina writer will see his first novel, Where All the Light Tends to Go, published by Putnam. The book, a gritty tale of “a young man seeking redemption,” is highly anticipated and has garnered advance praise from the likes of…

Rural Stigmata

Jen Coleman ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Poetry

I’ve nurtured the glowing wound: peroxide, salve, bandages. I’ve done right by this one. The rawness eased, was replaced by budding infant cells. Trenches formed in the nickel-sized spot where my fate and life lines intersected the injury, two deep vertical red canals in a waxy purple-pink circle: a burnt…

Still Life in Townsend

Melanie K. Hutsell ♦

Winter 2015 ♦

Fiction

1. Stevie Gibson never did like the picture, but she never did take it down. A dead pheasant still fully feathered, a bowl of oranges, a green glass goblet of wine, and an hourglass were arranged upon a pale tablecloth of folds and wrinkles, all against a shadowed background. She…

Sling Shot

Marc Harshman ♦

Fall 2014 ♦

Poetry

Chalk dust. Is returning really so simple? From the hallway, he can see through the open door of the abandoned classroom, through its far window, and out into the hay fields that lay beyond. There is a single bale rotting against the fence. They would stack them, he remembered, build forts…