Summary

2023 Colorado Book Award Winner, Literary Fiction

It’s almost a decade after the Great Recession, and in Colorado, St. Anthony Sausage has not recovered. Neither have its employees: a laid-off railway engineer, an exiled computer whiz, a young woman estranged from her infant daughter, an older man with cancer who lacks health care. As these low-wage workers interact under the supervision of the factory’s owner and his quietly rebellious daughter, they come to understand that in America’s postindustrial landscape, although they may help or comfort each other, they also have to do what’s best for themselves.

Over the course of these twelve interrelated stories, Rachel King gives life to diverse, complex, and authentic characters who are linked through the sausage factory and through their daily lives in a vividly rendered small town in Boulder County. The internal and external struggles of Bratwurst Haven’s population are immediately and intimately relatable and resonant: these people seek answers within the world they inhabit while questioning what it means to want more from their lives.

Contents

Railing
Visitation Day
A Friendship
A Deal
Poker Night
Childrearing
Murals
At the Lake
Strangers
Middle Age
Pavel
Bratwurst Haven

Author

Rachel King is the author of the novel People along the Sand. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Green Mountains Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Oregon and West Virginia University, she lives in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

Reviews

“An excellent collection that’s likely to appeal to fans of Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff—or to anybody with a taste for emotionally resonant short fiction.”
Kirkus Reviews

“Often hovering on the cusp of some potential change, the characters in Bratwurst Haven’s beautifully written stories share a yearning for more—a better relationship or job or simply a chance to feel content. These all-too-relatable struggles make the stories not only engrossing but also an intriguing and tenderly rendered study of this flawed world we call home.”
Rajia Hassib, author of A Pure Heart

“In these twelve linked short stories, Rachel King captures the magic of the American mountain west and the people who call it home. Her characters take work in a sausage factory, pull shifts at a bar to fund their art, struggle with booze and pills, or end up with a haircut after losing at poker. They also care for one another, offering kindnesses both large and small. In Bratwurst Haven, King uncovers the complicated ways humans connect, and she gives it to us in prose that is as crystal clear as a bright Colorado day. It is a collection that builds with each story revealing more and more of the friendships and family that bind us all together—and that we cannot escape from, even when we try.”
Wendy J. Fox, author of What If We Were Somewhere Else and If the Ice Had Held

“Bratwurst Haven is an endearing composite portrait of a working class community in transition.”
Foreword Reviews

Summary

In the space of one weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia, private investigator Big Jim Foote finds himself at the center of two murder investigations. Suspected of one killing at a local festival, he locates the body of a missing person immediately after. The cops are watching him, and Big Jim has a secret he dares not reveal: he is a bigfoot living in plain sight, charged with keeping his people in the surrounding hills from being discovered. To protect the bigfoot secret, he must solve both murders—and convince himself it wasn’t a bigfoot who pulled the trigger.

Through the course of his investigations, Big Jim is helped by unique and well-rendered characters and friends in both his bigfoot and human communities. Readers are introduced to Appalachian mountain folk and traditional culture in new ways, even while Big Jim experiences the impact of the opioid epidemic on his own bigfoot kin. By centering a mythical creature as the unlikely protagonist in this enchanting literary murder mystery, Foote offers a winsome redefinition of a cryptid “monster” and breathes new life into the PI genre.

Author

Tom Bredehoft lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. In an earlier life, he was an English professor specializing in medieval literature.

Reviews

“A tale about humanity wrapped in the garment of an excellent hard-boiled thriller. Part mystery, part fable but all original, Jim Foote is sure to be one of your favorite literary detectives—cryptid or otherwise.”
Jordan Farmer, author of The Poison Flood and The Pallbearer

“The first thing to say about Foote is that it is a strange and seemingly untenable hybrid of bigfoot fantasy and detective novel noir; the second is that its matter-of-fact voice and deeply authentic setting in the hollows of West Virginia render every part of the story perfectly real and entirely (marvelously) ordinary. This is a novel that uses moonshine heritage to delve into the modern opioid epidemic, and a novel that asks about the meaning of ‘otherness’ while reminding us what it means to be human. I fell into this book and loved it from the first page.”
Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Heart of Horses

“Family, folklore, and mountain folk culture all play starring roles in this cryptozoological conundrum that delights and entertains at every twist of the trail.”
Southern Review of Books

“A pleasure to read. . . . The West Virginia otherworld Bredehoft patiently builds in this compact, 224-page whodunit is a delightfully odd noir mélange.” 
West Virginia Humanities Council Broad Side 

Summary

In a book written by and for college teachers, Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy provide tips and advice on how to make all students feel welcome and included. They begin with a framework describing why explicit attention to structure enhances inclusiveness in both course design and interactions with and between students. Inclusive Teaching then provides practical ways to include more voices in a series of contexts: when giving instructions for group work and class activities, holding office hours, communicating with students, and more. The authors finish with an opportunity for the reader to reflect on what evidence to include in a teaching dossier that demonstrates inclusive practices.

The work of two highly regarded specialists who have delivered over a hundred workshops on inclusive pedagogy and who contribute frequently to public conversations on the topic, Inclusive Teaching distills state-of-the-art guidance on addressing privilege and implicit bias in the college classroom. It seeks to provide a framework for individuals and communities to ask, Who is being left behind and what can teachers do to add more structure?
 

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

Contents

Preface 

Chapter 1: Inclusive Teaching as a Mindset

Chapter 2: The Value of Structure

Chapter 3: Designing Your Course and Syllabus with an Inclusive Mindset

Chapter 4: Launching Your Course

Chapter 5: Classroom Environment and Interactions

Chapter 6: Inclusive Practices Outside the Classroom

Chapter 7: Reflecting and Documenting

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

Authors

Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy are award-winning instructors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a passion for student success, equity, and inclusion in the classroom. Both are leading the campus in curriculum reforms, bringing inclusive course design and pedagogy to all disciplines.

Reviews

“An important and necessary contribution to the conversation about teaching that is happening now, both postpandemic and in the wake of ongoing protests about racism in our society. The overall tone is one of compassion and deep understanding of what teaching entails and how to make it better for both instructor and student.”
Cyndi Kernahan, author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom

“Compelling and critical. Given the urgent need to promote justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our communities, the book is a must-read for all who are in a position to better support inclusive teaching inside and outside the classroom.”
Science

“Powerful and welcome. . . . There are a lot of pragmatic strategies to implement—something for faculty at every level of teaching expertise.”
Regan A. R. Gurung, coauthor of Thriving in Academia: Building a Career at a Teaching-Focused Institution

Summary

Picture a Professor is a collection of evidence-based insights and intersectional teaching strategies crafted by and for college instructors. It aims to inspire transformative student learning while challenging stereotypes about what a professor looks like.

Representing a variety of scholarly disciplines, the volume’s contributing authors offer practical advice for effectively navigating student preconceptions about embodied identity and academic expertise. Each contributor recognizes the pervasiveness of racialized, gendered, and other biases about professors and recommends specific ways to respond to and interrupt such preconceptions—helping students, teachers, and others reenvision what we think of when we picture a professor.

Educators at every stage of their career will find affirming acknowledgment of the ways systemic inequities affect college teaching conditions, as well as actionable advice about facilitating student learning with innovative course design, classroom activities, assessment techniques, and more.
 

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

Contents

Introduction: Embodied Identity, Empowering Pedagogy, and Transformative Learning
Jessamyn Neuhaus

Part One
The First Day: Strategies for Starting Strong

1. How Blind Professors Win the First Day: Setting Ourselves Up for Success
Sheri Wells-Jensen, Emily K. Michael, and Mona Minkara

2. Critical Reflexivity as a Tool for Students Learning to Recognize Biases: A First Day of Class Conversation on What a Professor Looks Like
Jesica Siham Fernández

3. Commonalities and Research: A One-Two Punch to Combat STEM Fears and Biases on the First Day of Class
Kelly E. Theisen

4. Where’s the Professor? First-Day Active Learning for Navigating Students’ Perceptions of Young Professors
Reba Wissner

Part Two
Making Connections: Strategies for Building Trust and Rapport with Students

5. Using Experiential Learning to Humanize Course Content and Connect with Students
Breanna Boppre

6. Collaborative Rubric Creation as a Queer, Transgender Professor’s Tactic for Building Trust in the Classroom
Fen Kennedy

7. Reflect to Deflect: Using Metacognitive Activities to Address Student Perceptions of Instructor Competence and Caring
Melissa Eblen-Zayas

8. From Absentminded Professor to Epistemic Collaborator: Reframing Academic Expertise through Vulnerability and Metacognition
Rebecca Scott

9. Black Man in a Strange Land: Using Principles of Psychology and Behavior Science to Thrive in the Classroom
Erik Simmons

Part Three
Anti-Racist Pedagogies: Strategies for Increasing Equity

10. Beyond Making Statements: The Reflective Practice of Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator
M. Gabriela Torres

11. Rippling the Patterns of Power: Enacting Anti-Racist Pedagogy with Students as Co-teachers
Chanelle Wilson and Alison Cook-Sather

12. Beyond “Good Writing”: Enacting Anti-Racist Policies in Academic Writing
Jacinta Yanders and Ashley JoEtta

Part Four
Teaching with Our Whole Selves: Strategies for Instructional Authenticity and Pedagogical/Professional Success

13. The Superpowers of Visual Ambiguity: Transfiguring My Experience of Colorism and Multiheritage Identity for Educational Good
Donna Mejia

14. Sharing Our Stories to Build Community, Highlight Bias, and Address Challenges to Authority
Sarah Mayes-Tang

15. Teaching Up: Bringing My Blackness into the Classroom
Celeste Atkins

16. Empowered Strategies for Women Faculty of Color Navigating Teaching Inequities in Higher Ed
Chavella T. Pittman

Index

Editor

Jessamyn Neuhaus is a professor of history and Center for Teaching Excellence director at SUNY Plattsburgh. Recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, she is the author of two historical monographs, numerous articles, and Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers.

Reviews

“Does a service to all who would prefer a different path, offering realistic strategies to engage students in undermining scholarly stereotypes.”
Science

“Raising awareness of challenges diverse instructors can face when teaching in higher ed classrooms and sharing empowering and tested solutions are both much needed. Picture a Professor does both and more. Grounded in the experiences of scholars teaching in the classroom, the book is a valuable resource for instructors, administrators, those responsible for promotion and tenure decisions, and educational developers partnering with a diverse faculty. Much praise to Jessamyn Neuhaus and chapter authors for addressing the often undiscussed truth that not all instructors who teach are afforded the same privileges.”
Tracie Marcella Addy, coauthor of What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching

“In this collection, the authors weave scholarship, personal narratives, and practical teaching ideas into an intersectional call to action that, when reflectively implemented, will positively transform our college classrooms for years to come.”
Travis Thurston, coeditor of Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction

Summary

Every history of West Virginia’s creation in 1863 explains the event in similar ways: at the start of the Civil War, political, social, cultural, and economic differences with eastern Virginia motivated the northwestern counties to resist secession from the Union and seek their independence from the rest of the state. In The Fifth Border State, Scott A. MacKenzie offers the first new interpretation of the topic in over a century—one that corrects earlier histories’ tendency to minimize support for slavery in the state’s founding.

Employing previously unused sources and reexamining existing ones, MacKenzie argues that West Virginia experienced the Civil War in the same ways as the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Like these northernmost slave states, northwestern Virginia supported the institution of slavery out of proportion to the actual presence of enslavement there. The people who became West Virginians built a new state first to protect slavery, but radical Unionists and escaping slaves forced emancipation on the statehood movement. MacKenzie shows how conservatives and radicals clashed over Black freedom, correcting many myths about West Virginia’s origins and making The Fifth Border State an important addition to the literature in Appalachian and Civil War history.

Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

Introduction 

1. Northwestern Virginia’s Path towards Reconciliation, 1829–1851

2. Northwestern Virginia on the Defensive, 1851–1860 

3. Northwestern Virginia in the Secession Crisis, January to July 1861 

4. The Conservative Phase of the West Virginia Statehood Movement, August 1861 to February 1862

5. The Radical Phase of the West Virginia Statehood Movement, March 1862 to June 1863

6. West Virginia under Radical Rule, June 1863 to December 1869

Epilogue: West Virginia Redeemed, 1870–1872

Appendix A: An Appeal of the People of West Virginia to Congress, Suggesting for the Consideration of Members Material Facts

Appendix B: Report of the Minority to Lincoln’s Border State Emancipation Plan, July 15, 1862

Notes

Author

Scott A. MacKenzie received his education at the University of Manitoba, Queens College of the City University of New York, the University of Calgary, and Auburn University. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Reviews

"Thoughtfully researched and lucidly argued."
Civil War Monitor

“A refreshing new look at how West Virginia became a state. I can see The Fifth Border State appealing widely to scholars of the Civil War era.”
William Hal Gorby, West Virginia University

Summary

Hawaiʻi is a primary site for development of herbicide-resistant corn seed and, until recently, was host to more experimental field trials of genetically engineered crops than anywhere else in the world. It is also a node of powerful resistance. While documentaries and popular news stories have profiled the biotech seed industry in Hawaiʻi, Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility is the first book to detail the social and historical conditions by which the chemical-seed oligopoly came to occupy the most geographically isolated islands in the world and made the soils of Hawaiʻi the epicenter of agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology testing.

Andrea Brower, an activist-scholar from Hawaiʻi, examines the consequences related to genetically engineered seed development for Hawaiʻi’s people and the social movement that has risen in response. With insights beyond the islands, Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility illuminates why visions for a radically better world must be expanded by intersectional and systemically oriented movements.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Contested Futures

1. The Agrochemical-Seed-Biotech Oligopoly

2. Science and Regulation in Service of Capital

3. “GMO Ground Zero”

4. Imperialism and the Making of a Plantation Economy

5. From Sugar to Monsanto

6. The State’s Redistribution of Collective Wealth

7. Resistance Is Fertile

8. Battling Monsanto in an Era of Neoliberal Cynicism

9. Seeds of Possibility

Bibliography
Index

Author

Andrea Noelani Brower is an activist-scholar from Kaua‘i. Her scholarship is rooted in collective movements for justice, equality, liberation, and ecological regeneration. She teaches in sociology, environmental studies, and leadership studies at Gonzaga University.

Reviews

“Where this book differs from other academic studies about power in Hawaiʻi is in its steadfast commitment to demonstrating the power of intersectional resistance. Brower’s interest in capitalism and agrochemical agriculture’s colonization of food production is not only to expose the dangers to human and nonhuman life but also to demonstrate how a resistance that spans ethnicities, classes, genders, and other distinct interest groups derives power from coalition instead of division. This book is a timely examination of Hawaiʻi’s struggles over land and power.”
Kathryn Besio, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo

“This book is a powerful intervention of truth and transparency into corporate darkness and influence. It explodes the myth of benevolence and the drive to feed the world in the agricultural biotechnology industry. What might seem like battles on the edge of the empire in places like Hawaiʻi can actually be seen as central sites of leadership, resistance, and innovation in grappling against global structures and power. Hawaiʻi’s place as the epicenter for a global battle over our future—the future of our food systems, the impacts of pesticides and herbicides on human health and environment, and the need for courageous actors—is made clear by this work. We need this book.”
Kamana Beamer, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Summary

Almanac for the Anthropocene collects original voices from across the solarpunk movement, which positions ingenuity, generativity, and community as beacons of resistance to the hopelessness often inspired by the climate crisis. To point toward practical implementation of the movement’s ideas, it gathers usable blueprints that bring together theory and practice. The result is a collection of interviews, recipes, exercises, DIY instructions, and more—all of it amounting to a call to create hope through action.

Inspired by a commitment to the idea that there can be no environmental justice without decolonial and racial justice, Almanac for the Anthropocene unites in a single volume both academic and practical responses to environmental crisis.

Contents

Introduction: The Situation So Far   
Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

Part 1: Generativity

Not Just Solar: Creating Our Own Powers, Stories, and Spaces
Brontë Christopher Wieland

1. Solarpunk Is a Verb for Rising
The Commando Jugendstil and Tales from the EV Studio

2. In Defense of Hope
Margaret Killjoy

3. Feeding Imagination
Giulia Lepori and Michał Krawczyk

4. A Collective Gardening Shed of Concepts for Planting Solarpunk Futures
Christoph D. D. Rupprecht

Part 2: Independence

Building toward Autonomy: Ways of Reclaiming the Present and the Future
Brontë Christopher Wieland

5. Your Mineral Footprint
Gabriel Aliaga

6. Solarpunk Design Guidelines
Navarre Bartz

7. How to Build a Solar-Powered Website
Kris De Decker

8. Solarpunks See the World: Traversing the World without Destroying It
Craig Stevenson

Part 3: Community

“All Organizing Is Science Fiction”: On Dreaming a Solarpunk Community
Phoebe Wagner

9. Science Fiction and Disability: Engage!
Petra Kuppers

10. The Urban Reef: Breaking Down Barriers between Green Spaces in Urban Environments
Octavia Cade

11. The Commensal Canine
Susan Haris

12. Solarpunk: The Fruitful Revolution
Connor D. Louiselle

Part 4: Ingenuity

Solarpunk Ingenuity and DIY Projects
Phoebe Wagner

13. Visible Mending: A Recipe for Beautiful and Sustainable Clothing
Sari Fordham

14. Appalachian Solarpunk: Growing Trees from Seed for the Plant Revolution
Vance Mullis and Joy Lew

15. Anthrocene Strategy: Foraging
Michael J. DeLuca

16. Multispecies Community Garden: A More-Than-Human Design Concept Proposal 
for Well-Being in Shrinking Cities
Christoph D. D. Rupprecht, Aoi Yoshida, and Lihua Cui

Conclusion: Looking Forward 
Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland

Contributors

Editors

Phoebe Wagner is a writer, academic, and coeditor of Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation. She lives in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Brontë Christopher Wieland has an MFA in creative writing and environment and is coeditor of Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

Reviews

"With their new anthology, Almanac for the Anthropocene, Wagner and Wieland continue to break new ground in the solarpunk genre. And like Sunvault, this new collection of work is sure to be a core component of solarpunk's standard reading curriculum." 
 Justine Norton-Kertson, Solarpunk Magazine

“I’m thankful for all that Wagner and Wieland have done to gather and champion those working in the solarpunk movement, and I believe this book will help bring new solarpunks into the fold, ready to join them in further thought and action.”
Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

“Wagner and Wieland demonstrate the breadth of the solarpunk movement through the collection’s ferocious expression of many possible futures, giving us tools and strategies for bringing those about, but reminding us that the conversation is not, and perhaps not ever, over.”
Sean Guynes, coeditor of Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction

Summary

2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot
Named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022
Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

Contents

Directions to a Vanishing Place
Chemical Bonds
Nine Forms of the Goddess
Be Like Wilt
The Blue-Red Divide
City Mouse/Country Mouse
Finding the Holy in an Unholy Coconut
Wine-Warmth
Magic Dust
A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy
Neighbors
The Hindu Hillbilly Spice Company
Shame-Shame
Our Armor
A History of Guns
Present-Life Hair
Only-Generation Appalachian
Thanks, Y’all

Author

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

Reviews

“This book lives beautifully in the gray area of trying to navigate a divisive environment while growing up queer and Asian American.”
Forbes

“I’m glad this memoir exists . . . and I’m especially glad it’s so good.”
Vauhini Vara, New York Magazine

“A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions.”
Scalawag

“A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience.”
Ms. Magazine

“Evocative and thought-provoking.”
Bitch Media

“Readers may be Indian, Appalachian, and queer or they may be some or none of these things. No matter—Avashia’s beautifully rendered prose contains insights to which everyone can relate.”
Still: The Journal

“Compelling and refreshing. . . . Appalachia needs more people like Neema Avashia.”
Daily Yonder

“This book gave me such tenderness toward a place that parsing my thoughts about it was like scooping up tadpoles with my bare hands.”
Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism

“Another Appalachia is a breath of fresh air, a work that the public is in dire need of reading. Wide and expansive as the land the author calls home, this essay collection subverts the mainstream’s hyperfocus on white male-dominated narratives from rural America and commands your attention from the first page to the last word.”
Morgan Jerkins, author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America and Caul Baby

“Neema Avashia, in this book, has named the unnamed, spoken the unspoken so that it does not become—to paraphrase Adrienne Rich—the unspeakable, and she has done so in language that is both lyrical and direct, both entertaining and edifying, both challenging and generous. I love this book and believe it introduces an important voice in America’s ongoing racial reckoning.”
Rahul Mehta, author of No Other World

“An essential text to add to the new canon of Appalachian writing—a compassionate and rigorous memoir of the author’s experience growing up as a queer Hindu child and teenager in a small community of West Virginian Indians. Another Appalachia is a bright and deeply empathetic portrait of a complicated place, a place that Neema Avashia allows to be multifaceted in the way it deserves.”
Anna Claire Weber, White Whale Bookstore

Summary

In the fall of 2018, a bomb goes off at a water-bottling plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, an incident the FBI declares an act of ecoterrorism. Arrested at the scene is Chris Bright, a mountain hermit with a long history of activism. Unaccounted for—and presumed dead—is Mara Wood, an installation artist who in the last two years has lost her son and left her husband.

But Mara’s estranged husband David cannot quite believe she is dead, and as he goes about reconstructing the story of what happened, he begins to imagine an alternate narrative—one in which their son doesn’t die and his wife doesn’t leave him, one in which his wife doesn’t carry on a secret relationship with Chris Bright, a man bent on fighting back against the environmental despoliation of his Appalachian home. Lioness is a page-turning, heart-wrenching examination of extremism: What pushes people to act violently, and is that violence ever justified?

Author

Mark Powell is the author of seven novels and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation, to Slovakia and Romania. He directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University.

Reviews

“Emotionally wrenching. . . . Haunting (and haunted) in the best possible way.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Powerful and layered, this is a tour de force . . . dark, moody, and mesmerizing.”
Foreword Reviews (starred review)

“He writes about difficult things in a beautiful way, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. . . . Powell’s love for his native turf comes through tangibly.”
Barbara Bennett, North Carolina Literary Review

“Lioness is a darkly compelling portrait of an artist who evolves into a homegrown ecoterrorist. Mark Powell’s brooding, twisty novel is packed with a distinctively American, highly explosive mixture of religion, art, sexual obsession, mental illness, and environmental menace.”
Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win and The Leftovers

“The best Appalachian novelist of his generation.” 
Ron Rash, author of Serena and In the Valley

“Mark Powell’s Lioness is a force of nature: moody, twisty, stormy, and supercharged with the fierce blue voltage of top-notch storytelling. It’s a riveting ecothriller that’s also a profound exploration of grief—grief for one another, and grief for the earth. What a powerful novel.”
Jonathan Miles, author of Anatomy of a Miracle

“A thriller with quickness and elegance, Lioness asks tough questions about our responsibilities to the natural world and to one another. In offering no easy answers, it achieves something beautiful and haunting. Mark Powell has written a gorgeous, enthralling, immensely readable novel that will hook you until the very last page.”
Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators

“Mark Powell’s Lioness is an immersive rendering of the human quest for love and healing amidst a world on fire—a fire we have set and cannot tame.”
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, author of Even as We Breathe

“In this haunting novel of passion and intrigue, Mark Powell takes on the environmental collapse coming at us and the people driven to action. Powell is a writer with mountains of talent, and here he creates complex and fascinating characters trying to figure a way out of grief and despair. Even love is sometimes violent.”
Janisse Ray, author of Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World beyond Humans

“Lioness takes the reader on a cross-country journey that is as much spiritual and psychological as it is physical. Mark Powell’s powerful descriptions capture the grief, love, and despair of his characters as they move through a land that’s been wrought by environmental degradation and an ever-changing climate.”
Jessica Cory, editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene

Summary

2023 IPPY Award, Great Lakes - Best Regional Fiction, Silver

One October night in the depressed steel town of Lodi, Ohio, two police officers respond to a call about trespassers in the derelict Lodi Steel machine shop. A chase through the crumbling cathedral of steel columns launches a chain of events that will test the officers’ partnership and leave a boy to fend for himself in a decaying Rust Belt neighborhood choked by joblessness, boredom, and addiction.

On the opposite end of town, a young woman steps out of a rust-bucket Grand Marquis into an all-night diner. Instead of luggage, she carries mementos: an ankh tattoo she inked herself and a wallet-sized photograph of a boy who disappeared. She doesn’t realize her ex-boyfriend has hired two brothers to track her down and bring her back, by any means necessary.

The complex female leads of Hungry Town, with its sharp dialogue and poetic sensibility, turn classic noir and cop drama tropes on their heads. These morally complicated characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes violently, sometimes with surprising compassion.

Author

Jason Kapcala is the author of the short story collection North to Lakeville. His writing has been nominated for numerous prizes, including the Pushcart Prize. He grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, near the ruins of the Bethlehem Steel Works, and now lives in northern West Virginia.

Reviews

“With the grit of a western and the crackle of a murder mystery, this finely wrought effort delivers the goods.”
Publishers Weekly

“A literary flair lifts this above the routine procedural.”
Kirkus Reviews

“These flawed people, dealt a losing hand, will not soon be forgotten.”
Akron Beacon Journal

“A literary page-turner that lends poetry to the forgotten town at the heart of this powerful novel, filled to its borders with complicated, honest characters who will linger in your imagination long after the last page. Part Cormac McCarthy, part Tom Drury and Raymond Chandler, Kapcala has created a voice all his own that captures his story and its setting perfectly.”
Brian Castleberry, author of Nine Shiny Objects

“A fun read, firmly fixed in the detective/crime novel genre but with a nice literary eye for details.”
Mesha Maren, author of Sugar Run