You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Palindrome, Hansel's sixth collection, is brave and brilliant. The vision of its title (a word that spells itself in both directions) infuses the whole with understanding that, as she was her mother's daughter, so she has become mother to the child who is her mother suffering dementia. Whether writing in fixed forms, free forms, or from her mother's written memories, Hansel creates a way to bear her readers, her mother, and herself though this harrowing time. This is a hard-won, heart-won book"--Publisher's website.
“A comprehensive and unsurpassed anthology of women writers from Appalachia . . . Exceptional in diversity and scope.” —Southern Historian Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia is a landmark anthology that brings together the work of 105 Appalachian women writers, including Dorothy Allison, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Annie Dillard, Nikki Giovanni, Denise Giardina, Barbara Kingsolver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Janice Holt Giles, George Ella Lyon, Sharyn McCrumb, and Lee Smith. Editors Sandra L. Ballard and Patricia L. Hudson offer a diverse sampling of time periods and genres, established authors and emerging voices. From regional favorites to national bestsellers, this unprecedented gather...
A poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia that does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own life.
The Women of Appalachia Project(TM) was created to address discrimination directed at women from the Appalachian region by encouraging participation from women artists of diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together, to embrace the stereotype, to show the whole woman; beyond the superficial factors that people use to judge her. Despite the educational and economic inequalities in Appalachia, despite the lack of adequate healthcare and jobs, despite the lack of infrastructure, there are women, such as these, who have contributed to the "Women Speak" Volume Six anthology, standing in defiance, their words and art like steel girders. In this anthology, this hope chest of creati...
Poetry. "I read in a glossary of mining terminology that prize means to lever or loosen with a pry bar or pick. And the term suggests the noun for what is gained: a prize. In COAL TOWN PHOTOGRAPH, Pauletta Hansel prizes memory for the resource that it is. Throughout, this book dives into the challenge of the past as place. Its journey is from underground-darkness to a state of earned brightness. As she tells us in the title poem: 'I am from / a place that could not hold me, / never even tried. Come morning, / mist of evening rain, a ghost above a mirrored sun.' We should prize the work of this traveler forever."--Roy Bentley
The Appalachian region stretches from Mississippi to New York, encompassing rural areas as well as cities from Birmingham to Pittsburgh. Though Appalachia's people are as diverse as its terrain, few other regions in America are as burdened with stereotypes. Author Frank X Walker coined the term "Affrilachia" to give identity and voice to people of African descent from this region and to highlight Appalachia's multicultural identity. This act inspired a group of gifted artists, the Affrilachian Poets, to begin working together and using their writing to defy persistent stereotypes of Appalachia as a racially and culturally homogenized region. After years of growth, honors, and accomplishments, the group is acknowledging its silver anniversary with Black Bone. Edited by two newer members of the Affrilachian Poets, Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden, Black Bone is a beautiful collection of both new and classic work and features submissions from Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney, Gerald Coleman, Crystal Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, and many others. This illuminating and powerful collection is a testament to a groundbreaking group and its enduring legacy.
Poetry. "TANGLE is made of poems that ache and grieve, desire and remember, the space between words and the hand. They capture the body's grace and the tumor backlit on a screen. They are waking and dreams, a jagged tear across our sleep. They are winter and a woman's last menses. They are a daughter's final summer at home, her mouth already remembering the tomato's ripeness. Pauletta Hansel's poems are also mystery we can taste here and now. Smoke from a father's cigarette. Packed-dirt yards. Oranges and cloves. Who we are, Hansel tell us, 'is hatched from who we were / this film of self now covering / who we will be.' These are poems to mend us." Karen Salyer McElmurry, author of Surrendered Child and Motel of the Stars"
Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders. This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class...
"The flood came at night, forcefully and quickly, destroying so many lives in its wake. Unfortunately, I'm afraid it will happen again and again."—Carter Sickels In late July 2022, a catastrophic flash flood claimed the lives of more than forty people and devastated homes and communities in Central Appalachia. The forty-fifth annual Appalachian Writers' Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky was in progress when surging floodwater forced the participants and staff to rush to higher ground. The school lost classrooms, housing, and gathering areas, as well as valuable equipment, and irreplaceable artifacts such as historical books and documents, photographs, and handmade m...
“This guidebook is an in-depth exploration of what makes Cincinnati’s neighborhoods what they are and how they came to be what they are.” —Mike Templeton, Urban Appalachian Community Coalition Cincinnati, Ohio, is a complex mix of many different things: its present and its past, its transitions and its legacies; what defines it and distinguishes it; what makes people love it and what makes some eventually leave it. This collection, written by both lifelong Cincinnatians and recent transplants, offers a sampling of life there today—the tensions, debates, the life-and-death battles, and, not least of all, the joys that make this city so alive. It’s a genuinely felt collection that ...