At their last biennial gathering, the Fellowship of Southern Writers awarded Jesse Graves their James Still Award for Writing About the Appalachian South.
Nikki Giovanni will receive the 2016 Literary Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Virginia. Nominations for the Fiction Award, for books published in 2015, include Lexington, Virginia, native, Robert Goolrick’s The Fall of Princes. Also West Virginia native, Ann Pancake’s Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories and Big Stone Gap, Virginia native, Adriana Trigiani’s All the Stars in the Heavens. In the non-fiction category, Sue Eisenfeld’s Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal was nominated along with Steven Lubet’s The “Colored Hero” of Harpers Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War Against Slavery and The Virginia Blue Ridge Railroad by Mary Evelyn Lyons and Cherokee Diaspora by Gregory Smithers. In the poetry category are Judy Light Ayyildiz’s Intervals: Appalachia to Istanbul, Julie Hensley’s Viable, David Huddle’s Dream Sender: Poems, and Thorpe Moeckel’s Arcadia Road.
J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy has been sitting near the top of the Hardback Non-fiction national best-sellers lists for several weeks now.
The September 12th Publishers Weekly gave Monsters in Appalachia by Sheryl Monks, due out in November 2016, a starred review inside a box - great exposure.