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Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia edited by Z. Zane McNeill

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This book features seventeen essays arranged in three sections: “Finding Self and Discovering Queer in Appalachia,” “Queer Hills, Hollers, and Mountain People,” and “Creating the Queer-Appalachian Archive.” “The works in Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia are thoughtful, well-researched, emotionally resonant, and beautifully made, all of which balances their sometimes harrowing imagery, and the hard truths they must share about queer experiences in a region that has not always treated the LGBTQ+ community with the care it deserves. Z. Zane McNeill has done a service for the public good in bringing together the eclectic perspectives of artists and makers from across a broad field of scholars, creative writers, photographers, naturalists, and more. I was continually moved by the love I felt expressed for Appalachia in this collection, a love soldered and made stronger by pain and resilience, by healing and kindness. I really cannot imagine an open-hearted reader not returning that feeling of love toward this book, built as it is on hope, generosity, and the recognition that every voice belongs in the chorus.”—Jesse Graves. “These deeply personal and theoretically informed essays explore the fight for social justice and inclusivity in Appalachia through the intersections of environmental action, LGBTQA+ representational politics, anti-racism, and movements for disability justice. This Appalachia is inhabited by a queer temporality and geography, where gardening lore teaches us that seeds dance into plants in their own time, not according to a straight-edged neoliberal discipline.” - Rebecca Scott. “This collection adds important voices to the chorus rising from the region, singing their own songs and telling their own stories. Playing with genre, form, subject, and positionality, the text offers a beautifully messy vision of a beautifully messy place. The resistance to category serves us all, pushing boundaries and reminding us of the superficialities of most boundaries that shape us. The inclusion of voices unused to existing in the same volumes—of gerontologists and artists and farmers and activists and folklorists and more—creates an overwhelming sense of complexity. That complexity is precisely what we need in mind when we try to write about Appalachia, or when we try to write about queerness. This collection is disruptive and unsettling—in the very best ways” - Meredith McCarroll. The editor lives in West Virginia and co-edited Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression.

 Oakland, California: PM Press, 2022. 200 pages with an Index and photos. Trade paperback.