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The July Indie Next List – from the American Booksellers Association – includes: Stay and Fight by Madeline Ffitch Under Currents by Nora Roberts   The Library of Virginia nominates three people for three Literary Awards each year. Here are the nominees with strong personal and/or subject connections to Appalachia: FICTION: James A. McLaughlin – Bearskin Tim Poland – Yellow Stonefly NON- FICTION: Catherine Kerrison – Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black in a Young America Beth Macy – Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America POETRY: Michael Chitwood – Search and Rescue Erika Meitner –...

West Virginia Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman, has won the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award for his poem, “Poet in the Schools.” The award is presented by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey. In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow is one of the most celebrated new debut novels of this season. Those few who are familiar with West Mills, North Carolina, a historically Black community in Mason County, North Carolina, near Franklin, may have wondered if this is the setting. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, De’Shawn Charles Winslow told Michael Schaub that...

We are saddened to have to report the death on May 3rd of Chuck Kinder. He died of heart failure in a Miami Hospital the day before his wife of 44 years, Diane Cecily, planned to bring him home for hospice care. Born on October 8, 1942, in Montgomery, West Virginia, Kinder credited the story-telling prowess of his grandmother and his aunts for his story-telling inspiration. His father was a World War II veteran and insurance salesman, and his mother an emergency room nurse. They moved within West Virginia more than once, and Kinder started in technical school, but earned...

Spring Okra Picks from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance include: The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson is set in Eastern Kentucky. Publication date: May 7 Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler features a protagonist from rural North Georgia Like Lions by Brian Panowich has the same North Georgia as his first book, Bull Mountain. Papa Put a Man on the Moon by Kristy Dempsey who went to elementary school in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and graduated from High School in Greenville, S.C. Publication Date: May 7 The American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next List for May, 2019 includes The Book...

Crystal Wilkinson has been awarded a 2019 McKnight Foundation Artists Fellowship for Writing.   Quiver by Julia Watts is a 2018 Foreword INDIES Finalist in Young Adult Fiction. Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro is a finalist in Literary Fiction.   Books with Appalachian connections swept all three categories of the 2019 Southern Book Prize awarded by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance! The Line That Held Us by David Joy is the fiction winner. Joy lives in Webster, North Carolina, and this book is set in Western North Carolina. The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg is the non-fiction...