Summary

Emme McLean never imagined that in 1999 she would be living out the lyrics of the ancient murder ballads she grew up singing. But now Emme is back in Red River, Kentucky, using her skills as a journalist to prove her cousin did not kill her husband and to find out what is terrifying the town after many of its women went half-mad on the same night.

But to help her hometown’s haunted women, Emme must also face the things that haunt her, things she thought she had lost when she chose to move away: the majestic music of her family’s beloved hills and hollows, the mysterious old ways of her Appalachian kin, and the memory of her remarkable first love, Evan. Through it all, she must reckon with her magical “mountain gift”—is it real, or merely a unique synesthesia? And can she trust it to help heal her family and her town, a place still plagued by the social injustice that first drove her away? Can she trust it to help heal herself?

Author

Lana K. W. Austin teaches writing at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals. Winner of the 2019 Alabama State Poetry Society Book of the Year Award and the 2018 Words and Music Poetry Award, Austin has an MFA from George Mason University.

Reviews

“Like Light, Like Music captures the way the past haunts us and shapes our reality. With the help of their ancestors, the resilient McLean women are determined to prove the innocence of one of their own. The pulse of this lyrical novel beats: Believe women. Believe women. Believe women.”
Savannah Sipple, author of WWJD and Other Poems

“Austin has written a highly original and captivating novel filled with the mountain music and lore she loves so much—haints, broonies, banshees, shades, and revenants share the stage with all the memorable real characters of Red River, Kentucky. Contemporary issues merge with a developing romance in this spellbinding story, truly a ballad itself.”
Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls and Guests on Earth

“This is a novel about the light of vision, and music in the blood. Emmeretta has the ‘mountain gift’ of synesthesia, and she sees with her ears as well as with memory and imagination. But Like Light, Like Music is also a mystery story about uncovering secrets of the past, of family bonds and family ghosts. It is about the pain at the heart of country music, and joy in the place the music comes from. It is a story of the complexity of family ties and romances, and of the way confronting painful truths can make us free. It is a ballad of a novel, both timely and timeless.”
Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Chasing the North Star

“Like Light, Like Music is a novel full of divergences that pursues the loves, lives, and lore of kith and kin. In it, a town’s haunting is a reason to delve into community’s stories—full of ‘despair merging with magnificence.’”
Foreword Review

Summary

From farm to factory, alcoholism to war wounds, friendship to betrayal, the stories in A Place Remote take us intimately into the hearts of people from all walks of life in a rural Ohio town. Whether they stay in their town or leave for distant places, these characters come to realize no one is immune to the fictions people tell others—and themselves—to survive.

In each of these ten stories, Gwen Goodkin forces her characters to face the dramatic events of life head-on—some events happen in a moment, while others are the fallout of years or decades of turning away. A boy is confronted by the cost of the family farm, an optometrist careens toward an explosive mental disaster, a mourning teen protects his sister, lifelong friends have an emotional confrontation over an heirloom, and a high school student travels to Germany to find his voice and, finally, a moment of long-awaited redemption.

Contents

Winnie
A Boy with Sense
How to Hold It All In
Just Les Is Fine
The Widow Complex
Last Chance
The Key
Waiver
As I Lay Living
A Month of Summer

Author

Gwen Goodkin’s stories and essays have been published in literary magazines throughout the United States and beyond. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is the recipient of the Folio Editor’s Prize and the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. Born and raised in Ohio, she now lives in Encinitas, California. Learn more at gwengoodkin.com.

Reviews

“Gwen Goodkin’s debut short story collection follows in the tradition of other meteoric writers like Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Gaitskill, Lauren Groff, and so many before them, heralding a new, sui generis voice that promises so much to come.”
Rex Pickett, author of Sideways and The Archivist

“Some of the stories in A Place Remote resemble the strong and deep feeling of Sherwood Anderson’s collection Winesburg, Ohio that put the American heartland under a microscope in the early years of the last century. Other stories speak to the zany, contemporary world of the twenty-first century, in that same place. What makes Gwen Goodkin’s stories so important is that with wit and compassion they touch on the desire to return to the strong loyalty and its values that this America tugs us back to.”
Mark Jay Mirsky, editor of Fiction and professor of English, City College of New York

Summary

2020 National Book Award Finalist, Fiction
2021 PEN/Faulkner Winner
2020 Story Prize Winner
2020 L.A. Times Book Prize: Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Winner

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions.

There is fourteen-year-old Jael, who has a crush on the preacher’s wife. At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year” arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

Contents

Eula
Not-Daniel
Dear Sister
Peach Cobbler
Snowfall
How to Make Love to a Physicist
Jael
Instructions for Married Christian Husbands
When Eddie Levert Comes
Acknowledgments

Author

Deesha Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, the Rumpus, Brevity, TueNight, and elsewhere. Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, she currently lives in Pittsburgh with her daughters.

Reviews

“A collection of luminous stories populated by deeply moving and multifaceted characters. . . . Tender, fierce, proudly black and beautiful, these stories will sneak inside you and take root.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Triumphant. . . . Philyaw’s stories inform and build on one another, turning her characters’ private struggles into a beautiful chorus.”
Publishers Weekly

“Beguiling.”
The New Yorker

“Vivid, vibrant stories that will linger on your tongue like sweet tea.”
Vox

“The church, sexuality, and everyday life come alive in each story bringing readers closer to experiences we can, or have, seen ourselves in.”
Electric Lit, “24 New and Forthcoming Books That Celebrate Black Lives”

“The stories of these women and their friendships come alive, beating with tenderness and imperfection, and build upon one another to create a beautiful melody of female determination.”
Amazon Book Review, “12 Must-Read Books by Black Authors Coming in Fall 2020”

“In this year of constriction and pain, juicy goodness bursts from every page of Deesha Philyaw's debut short story collection. . . . This collection marks the emergence of a bona fide literary treasure.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Full of lived-in humanity, warmth, and compassion.”
Pittsburgh Current

“These are stories about Black women that haven’t been told with this level of depth, wit, or insight before, so it will not shock me if Oprah gets around to selecting it before the end of the year.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Incredibly moving.”
Pittsburgh City Paper

“Sex, friendship, freedom, and agency are centered throughout this cheeky, insightful, and irresistible new book.”
Ms. Magazine

“Stunning. . . Philyaw’s stories are addictive while also laying bare the depth and vulnerability of Black women.”
Observer

“Beautifully crafted. A lovely collection.”
Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

“Our new decade deserves a new literary force with major literary skills. Deesha Philyaw uses the comic, the allegorical, and the geographic to examine black intimacies and black secrets. Her work is as rigorous as it is pleasurable to read.”
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“To encounter Deesha Philyaw’s work is to encounter contemporary folktales. They are the stories of southern customs and mores and of voices over the back fence. The daughters and granddaughters of Toni Cade Bambara and Bebe Moore Campbell readers need this book.”
Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water and writer for the Marvel Comics World of Wakanda series

“This is no mere collection of sappy romance stories. The love in Philyaw’s stories runs the gamut from sweet to bitter, sexy to sisterly, temporary to time tested, often with hidden aspects. The word secret in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.”
Tara Campbell, author of Midnight at the Organporium, from Barrelhouse magazine

Press Release

Download the press release for The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Summary

Agrarian social movements are at a crossroads. Although these movements have made significant strides in advancing the concept of food sovereignty, the reality is that many of their members remain engaged in environmentally degrading forms of agriculture, and the lands they farm are increasingly unproductive. Whether movement farmers will be able to remain living on the land, and dedicated to alternative agricultural practices, is a pressing question.

The Political Ecology of Education examines the opportunities for and constraints on advancing food sovereignty in the 17 de Abril settlement, a community born out of a massacre of landless Brazilian workers in 1996. Based on immersive fieldwork over the course of seven years, David Meek makes the provocative argument that critical forms of food systems education are integral to agrarian social movements’ survival. While the need for critical approaches is especially immediate in the Amazon, Meek’s study speaks to the burgeoning attention to food systems education at various educational levels worldwide, from primary to postgraduate programs. His book calls us to rethink the politics of the possible within these pedagogies.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I: Conceptions of the World

1. It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way

2. The Struggle on the Land

3. Space Wasn’t Easy

4. To Stay, or to Leave?

Interlude

Part II: Terrain of Ideologies

5. Communities of Praxis

6. Fences around Knowledge

7. Learning through Movement

8. Revisiting Territory

Epilogue

Notes
References
Index

Author

David Meek is an environmental anthropologist, critical geographer, and food systems education scholar with area specializations in Brazil and India. He is assistant professor of global studies at the University of Oregon.

Reviews

“The Political Ecology of Education is a revelation. By focusing our attention on the role of critical food systems pedagogy in enacting food sovereignty in the most important social movement in the world, David Meek’s book offers a new and vital contribution to political ecology and agrarian studies.”
Bradley Wilson, West Virginia University

“This extraordinary book is about nothing less than survival: the survival of workers, communities, and the landscapes that they call home in the Brazilian Amazon. Meek weaves together beautifully written ethnography with a brilliant analysis of agricultural political ecologies. This is a must-read for all of us who care about rural communities and sustainable futures.”
Paige West, Columbia University 

Summary

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Aaron Blackwelder
Susan D. Blum
Arthur Chiaravalli
Gary Chu
Cathy N. Davidson
Laura Gibbs
Christina Katopodis
Joy Kirr
Alfie Kohn
Christopher Riesbeck
Starr Sackstein
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
Jesse Stommel
John Warner

Receive a 30% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of this title with code HIGHEREDBULK30 at checkout.

Contents

Foreword
Alfie Kohn

Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade?
Susan D. Blum

Part I: Foundations and Models

1. How to Ungrade
Jesse Stommel

2. What Going Gradeless Taught Me about Doing the “Actual Work”
Aaron Blackwelder

3. Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments
Susan D. Blum

4. Shifting the Grading Mindset
Starr Sackstein

5. Grades Stifle Student Learning. Can We Learn to Teach without Grades?
Arthur Chiaravalli

Part II: Practices

6. Let’s Talk about Grading
Laura Gibbs

7. Contract Grading and Peer Review
Christina Katopodis and Cathy N. Davidson

8. Critique-Driven Learning and Assessment
Christopher Riesbeck

9. A STEM Ungrading Case Study: A Reflection on First-Time Implementation in Organic Chemistry II
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh

10. The Point-less Classroom: A Math Teacher’s Ironic Choice in Not Calculating Grades
Gary Chu

Part III: Reflections

11. Grade Anarchy in the Philosophy Classroom
Marcus Schultz-Bergin

12. Conference Musings and The G Word
Joy Kirr

13. Wile E. Coyote, the Hero of Ungrading
John Warner

Conclusion: Not Simple but Essential
Susan D. Blum

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Editor

Susan D. Blum is professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on education builds on her academic specialties of linguistic, psychological, cultural, and educational anthropology. She is the author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture and “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, among other works.

Reviews

“I love this book. It undermines the mythology around grading, helping us understand that (a) grading is a construction, and a relatively recent one at that, and (b) we’d be better off without it—as would our students.”
Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World

“Nuanced and well balanced.”
Choice Reviews

Summary

In one of the first collections of scholarship at the intersection of LGBTQ studies and Appalachian studies, voices from the region’s valleys, hollers, mountains, and campuses blend personal stories with scholarly and creative examinations of living and surviving as queers in Appalachia. The essayists collected in Storytelling in Queer Appalachia are academics, social workers, riot grrrl activists, teachers, students, practitioners, scholars of divinity, and boundary crossers, all imagining how to make legible the unspeakable other of Appalachian queerness.

Focusing especially on disciplinary approaches from rhetoric and composition, the volume explores sexual identities in rural places, community and individual meaning-making among the Appalachian diaspora, the storytelling infrastructure of queer Appalachia, and the role of the metronormative in discourses of difference. Storytelling in Queer Appalachia affirms queer people, fights for queer visibility over queer erasure, seeks intersectional understanding, and imagines radically embodied queer selves through social media

Contents

Introduction
 
Part I: The Heart Over the Head: Queer-affirming Epistles and Queer-phobic Challenges

Part II: Queer Diaspora: Existence and Erasure in Appalachia
 
Part III: Both/And: Intersectional Understandings of Appalachian Queers
 
Part IV: Queer Media: Radical Acts of Embodiment and Resistance

List of Contributors

Index

Author

Hillery Glasby is an assistant professor in the writing, rhetoric, and American cultures department and a faculty fellow for the Center for Gender in Global Context at Michigan State University.

Sherrie Gradin is a professor of English at Ohio University.

Rachael Ryerson is the director of composition and a lecturer at Ohio University.

Reviews

“Storytelling in Queer Appalachia offers us a beautifully disruptive way to rethink our understandings of a singular Appalachia—as a place, as a people, as an ideology. These insightful chapters approach queerness-in-place through a host of engaging lenses and frameworks.”
William P. Banks, coeditor of Approaches to Teaching LGBT Literature

Summary

Mass starvation’s causes may seem simple and immediate: crop failure, poverty, outbreaks of violence, and poor governance. But famines are complex, and scholars cannot fully understand what causes them unless they look at their numerous social and environmental precursors over long arcs of history and over long distances.

Famine in the Remaking examines the relationship between the reorganization of food systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. This examination identifies the structural transformations—that is, changes to the relationships between producers and consumers—that make food systems more vulnerable to failure. Moving beyond the economic and political explanations for food crisis that have dominated the literature, Stian Rice emphasizes important socioecological interactions, developing a framework for crisis evolution that identifies two distinct temporal phases and five different types of causal mechanisms involved in food system failure. His framework contributes to current work in famine prevention and, animated by a commitment to social justice, offers the potential for early intervention in emerging food crises.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. The Hawaiian Sandalwood Famines: 1820s

2. Madagascar’s “Cactus War”: 1924–30

3. War and Reconstruction Famine in Cambodia: 1970–79

4. Famine in the Remaking: The Structure of Food System Failure

Notes

References

Index

Author

Stian Rice is a food systems geographer whose research examines the slow-moving social and environmental changes to agricultural production and food consumption. He received a doctorate in geography from Kent State University and is currently with the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Reviews

“Important and impressive scholarly work.”
Pritam Singh, University of Oxford

“An elegant and impassioned comparative account . . . At a moment when the specter of famine appears close, Stian Rice’s Famine in the Remaking is a compelling and welcome intervention into the origins of famine.”
Agricultural History

Summary

Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

On January 9, 2014, residents across Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to an unusual licorice smell in the air and a similar taste in the public drinking water. That evening residents were informed the tap water in tens of thousands of homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of schools and hospitals—the water made available to as many as 300,000 citizens in a nine-county region—had been contaminated with a chemical used for cleaning crushed coal.

This book tells a particular set of stories about that chemical spill and its aftermath, an unfolding water crisis that would lead to months, even years, of fear and distrust. It is both oral history and collaborative ethnography, jointly conceptualized, researched, and written by people—more than fifty in all—across various positions in academia and local communities. I’m Afraid of That Water foregrounds the ongoing concerns of West Virginians (and people in comparable situations in places like Flint, Michigan) confronted by the problem of contamination, where thresholds for official safety may be crossed, but a genuine return to normality is elusive.

Download a free copy of the book in the Free Book PDF tab.

Contents

Coming soon.

Editors

Luke Eric Lassiter is a professor of humanities and anthropology and director of the graduate humanities program at Marshall University. He is the author of Invitation to Anthropology, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, and, with Elizabeth Campbell, Doing Ethnography Today.

Brian A. Hoey is a professor of anthropology and associate dean of the honors college at Marshall University and author of Opting for Elsewhere.

Elizabeth Campbell is chair of the department of curriculum and instruction at Appalachian State University. She is the coeditor of Re-imagining Contested Communities and coauthor of Doing Ethnography Today.

Reviews

"A great example of a multiauthored and intersubjective ethnography of toxic suffering, this book is a model for future disaster ethnographies."
Peter Little, Rhode Island College

"A unique, moving, and highly readable account of community reactions to a technological disaster. Authors weave together powerful and highly personal narratives that reveal the tensions of coping with ongoing environmental uncertainty. With a novel, collaborative approach, they make meaningful connections between the experiences of local residents and the systems and institutions that produce and perpetuate disasters and their aftermaths. Readers of all stripes will find it as enlightening as it is poignant."
Melissa Checker, coeditor of Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice

“In a perfect world, I'm Afraid of That Water would be required reading.”
Journal of Appalachian Studies

Free Book PDF

Download I'm Afraid of That Water

Summary

In Heeding the Call, William Jolliff offers the first book-length discussion of West Virginia writer and activist Denise Giardina, perhaps best known for her novel Storming Heaven, which helped spark renewed interest in the turn-of-the-century Mine Wars. Jolliff proposes that Giardina’s fiction be considered under three thematic complexes: regional, political, and theological. Though addressing all three, Heeding the Call foregrounds the theological because it is the least accessible to most readers and critics.

In chapters devoted to each of Giardina’s novels, Jolliff attends to her uses of history, her formal techniques, and the central themes that make each work significant. What becomes clear is that while the author’s religious beliefs inform her fiction, she never offers easy answers. Her narratives consistently push her characters—and her readers—into more challenging and meaningful questions. Jolliff concludes by arguing that although Giardina’s initial fame has been tied to her significance as an Appalachian novelist, future studies must look beyond the regional to the deeply human questions her novels so persistently engage.

Contents

Coming soon.

Author

William Jolliff is a professor of English at George Fox University. He is the editor of The Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and author of Twisted Shapes of Light, a collection of poetry.

Reviews

“A needed book. Heeding the Call offers acute commentary on all of Giardina’s novels and ties them together with overarching themes. Educators, students, scholars, and readers alike will find it useful.”
Theresa L. Burriss, director of the Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, Radford University