Oil’s nature, the fact that it is everywhere, unctuously oozing into every corner of everyday life, means that it constantly spills over out of our existing forms, genres, and systems, demanding accommodation. To try to contain it, we create new forms—petroforms.

The Keep—the term for “the strongest or central tower of a castle, acting as a final refuge”—is a love letter to an unexpected place and adopted lifestyle in Appalachia by a husband and wife.

Morris explores the song “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in various contexts such as it pertains to West Virginia geography and heritage and the diversity of these beliefs, external perceptions of the state, and the song as a phenomenon across different media platforms.

Each college campus shooting leaves an archival record. Julija Šukys examines the documentation—court transcripts, police reports, institutional reports, and monuments to the dead—and confronts what it means to live in a place where students and their teachers are gunned down on a regular basis.

An engrossing account of technological innovation and business conducted at high speed, showing how the invention of the cable modem engendered the modern revolution in broadband Internet access over a ubiquitous, existing cable television infrastructure.

A disabled woman’s deathbed letter to the adoptive mother of her unexpected child recounting the precarious events of the last year of her life.

How a rocky start with the WVU Mountaineers shaped Bobby Bowden into one of the greatest football coaches in NCAA history.

A critical examination of American small-town narratives contrasted with lived experiences.

Campanioni blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history while mobilizing the intensely personal to explore the very specific cultural issue of contemporary exile.

A keywords-style reference of over 100 contemporary terms on energy and environmental politics connects historical injustices with current environmental crises.

A keywords-style reference of over 100 contemporary terms on energy and environmental politics connects historical injustices with current environmental crises.

Over forty poems about Appalachia and contemporary West Virginia from the state poet laureate.

The first extensive study devoted to leading contemporary Irish poet Paula Meehan.

This debut novel by a Ghanaian writer answers the question, “When the souls of enslaved Black people flew away to freedom, where did they go?” with a queer Black femme take on traditional African religions and Vodou, highlighting the interdependence of magic and freedom. 

This first critical edition of William Delisle Hay’s novel introduces readers to the earliest tale of urban apocalypse and environmental devastation through a curated collection of historical excerpts and contemporary scholarly discussions of global warming, colonialism, public health, and the Anthropocene.

2024 Weatherford Award Winner, Nonfiction

Through the essays, letters, and artwork created by people in prison, this collection provides insight into the Appalachian Prison Book Project—a nonprofit that provides books to incarcerated people in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.

2025 PEN America Finalist, Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

2025 National Book Award Honoree, "5 Under 35" 

Foregrounding the voices of Indigenous intellectuals, Monani reframes our popular and scholarly understandings of Indigenous cinema as discursively and materially entangled in the environment.

A history of Saharan winds melds into a discussion of energy development and the politics of energy systems, arguing that changing the way we imagine and understand wind will help ensure a globally just wind energy future.

2024 George Perkins Marsh Prize Runner-up
 

Compelling, candid, and sometimes violent stories drawn from oral history frame the American lumberjack at the intersection of labor and environment. 

By uncovering how higher education and gender roles evolved in Appalachia over time, this book delivers a history that contradicts the stereotype of the region as hostile to education—including mini biographies of women who attended Madison College in the 19th century.

An indigent queer sculptor details the culmination and dissolution of her chosen family of artists, bohemians, and libertines in an American city engulfed in civil conflict.

A trippy and darkly funny portrait of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is the tragicomic yarn of one troubled college dropout’s desperate attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed working man.
 

From the author of This Is One Way to Dance, linked short stories braided with images and ephemera explore the experiences of growing up and living as a diasporic Gujarati woman searching for home.

Part nature guide, part self-help column, and all love letter to the more-than-human world, Utter, Earth is an exercise in wonder. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach.

A biography of Bruce Crawford, a southwest Virginia journalist-writer of the radical tradition and one of the first to interpret Appalachian labor history.

Roxy and Coco, sisters and glamorous harpies (mythical bird women), work to save the world by stopping child abuse, while also trying to evade capture. For readers of Neil Gaiman and Karen Russell.

Grappling with innate desires and LGBTQ identity, a family struggles under the oppressive expectations foisted on them by fundamentalist Christianity.

Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers.

Original stories of Black family life in Louisville, Kentucky, for readers of Dantiel Moniz (Milk Blood Heat) and Kai Harris (What the Fireflies Knew).
“Surprising and revelatory. . . . I love this book.” —Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us

Scholarly and activist perspectives on identities often overlooked in the study of geography: youth and age.

A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America.
“Every so often, a book comes along that changes the way we see, speak, and think about the world. Shattered is one of those books.” —Frank B. Wilderson III, author of Afropessimism and Incognegro

Acclaimed author Erik Reece spends a year beside a rural Kentucky stream, in close observation of the natural world’s cycles, revelations, and redemptions.

A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations.

The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.

One of the first book-length considerations of the Appalachian writer Robert Morgan.

How teachers can help combat higher education’s mental health crisis.

Historians investigate the relationships between film, culture, and energy.

For readers of Elena Ferrante, Nicole Krauss, and Carmen Maria Machado, In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me is a braided story collection that invokes the real, surreal, and mythic to explore the longings and loneliness of contemporary love.
 

A more-than-human approach to planetary survival, from a leading environmental humanist.