2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction
With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about
Hillbilly Elegy
accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?
Appalachian Reckoning
is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow
has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond
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
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,
makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.