Meet Felicia Mitchell, whose new collection of poems, “Trail Magic,” is inspired by hikes around southwest Virginia and other places. Whether you are an avid hiker, an armchair naturalist, or someone who simply loves vicarious rambles through the natural world, you will find wonders and kinship in these poems. Mitchell is a professor emeritus at […]

In a career spanning more than fifty years, from “The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed” in 1968 to “Silver Alert” in 2023, through twelve novels and four collections of short stories, Lee Smith has given voice to Appalachian women of all ages and backgrounds. Actress Quinn Hawkesworth and musician Eugene Wolf will use five of […]

Meet three regional writers who have researched and dramatized portions of Abingdon’s history. Bonny Gable’s “The Martha Odyssey” imagines life at Martha Washington College in 1915, focusing on an aspiring young pianist who has to deal with the ghosts from her past. In “Abingdon‘s Boardinghouse Murder,” Greg Lilly explores the sensational 1945 murder of a […]

Meet Erika Howsare, the author of "The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors." In this masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies, Howsare investigates our human connections with deer for millennia. In the twenty-first century, our relationship with deer is still intimate, yet full of contradictions. We hunt and protect […]

Meet William Sikes, the author of “The End of Meaning: Cultural Change in America Since 1945.” Toward the end of the 20th century, many became anxious about the collapse and decline of the institutions which gave meaning to people’s lives. In this book, Sikes explores the forces that have brought about the extraordinary decline in […]

Meet Mark Powell, the novelist whom Ron Rash has called “the best Appalachian novelist of the current generation.” His seventh novel is “The Late Rebellion,” a dramatization of social changes that have taken place in small towns where the older generation is clinging to older social norms and the younger generation is defying them. Underlying […]

Meet Jane Hicks, the Kingsport, Tennessee poet, who has recently published a new volume of poetry, “The Safety of Small Things.” The poems in this collection juxtapose the splendor and revelations of nature and science, the circle of life, how family and memories give honor to those we have lost, and how can all fit […]

Meet Rick Van Noy, a Radford University English professor and environmental activist, who will speak about his work, “Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South.” Using creative non-fiction techniques of narrative, scene, humor, and dialogue, Van Noy says that in the book, he wants to move climate change “out of abstraction, to bring […]

Meet Francis Gary Powers, Jr. the co-author, with Christopher Sturdevant, of “Cold War Virginia.” Virginia played a central role in United States involvement during the Cold War. With doomsday operations underway for World War III during the 1950s, the Pentagon, CIA, and other federal agencies established Northern Virginia as the epicenter of decision-making. Virginia military […]