Book Cover
Proud to announce my photo on the cover of the recent anthology Appalachian Reckoning. The photo was taken while working in conjunction with Looking At Appalachia and on my long-term personal project Like An Echo. Appalachian Reckoning was published in response to J.D. Vance’s #1 New York Times Bestseller Hillbilly Elegy.
I captured the image just off the main road leading up to Wayah Bald in Macon County, North Carolina. It’s a beautiful place made all the more beautiful by its history. Like An Echo explores the construct of home while asking, can geography be a part of your history though one doesn’t exist there?
Screenshot, The New York Times.
“Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.”
“It is one thing to write a personal memoir extolling the wisdom of one’s personal choices but quite something else — something extraordinarily audacious — to presume to write the ‘memoir’ of a culture.”
