Books published by West Virginia University Press

The essays in this book use the nine-line poem known as "Caedmon's Hymn" as a lens on the world of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Relatively little attention has been paid to what the story of Caedmon and his hymn might tell us about the material as well as the textual culture of Bede's world. The essays in this collection seek to connect "Caedmon's Hymn" to Bede s material world.

In one of the first collections of scholarship at the intersection of LGBTQ studies and Appalachian studies, voices from the region;s valleys, hollers, mountains, and campuses blend personal stories with scholarly and creative examinations of living and surviving as queers in Appalachia.

Critically examines the new destructive projects of resentment that have surfaced in the political spaces opened by neoliberalism's failures, particularly since the financial collapse of 2008. It contextualises the recent history of the Global North - notably Brexit and the Trump election - among wider comparative politics.

Critically examines the new destructive projects of resentment that have surfaced in the political spaces opened by neoliberalism's failures, particularly since the financial collapse of 2008. It contextualises the recent history of the Global North - notably Brexit and the Trump election - among wider comparative politics.

Offers the first book-length discussion of West Virginia writer and activist Denise Giardina, perhaps best known for her novel Storming Heaven, which helped spark renewed interest in the turn-of-the-century Mine Wars.

"Famine in the Remaking examines the relationship between the reorganization of food systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. This examination identifies the structural transformations that make food systems more vulnerable to failure"--

MK and Colleen get reacquainted while working at different stores in a bankrupt mall. Way back, the women went to Catholic school together and collaborated on racy letters to a soldier in Vietnam who thought they were much older than seventh graders - a ruse that typifies later shenanigans, usually brought on by red-headed Colleen.

An ambitious response to the current state of affairs, at once political and practice - the work of an activist, teacher, and public intellectual grappling with some of the most pressing topics at the intersection of higher education and social justice, including everything from impostor syndrome to cell phones in class to allegations of a campus 'free speech crisis'.

Teaching the Literature Survey Course makes the case for maintaining--even while re-imagining and re-inventing--the place of the survey as a transformative experience for literature students. Through essays both practical and theoretical, the collection presents survey teachers with an exciting range of new strategies for energizing their teaching and engaging their students in this vital encounter with our evolving literary traditions.?From mapping early English literature to a team-based approach to the American survey, and from multimedia galleries to a "blank syllabus," contributors propose alternatives to the traditional emphasis on lectures and breadth of coverage. The volume is at once a set of practical suggestions for working teachers (including sample documents like worksheets and syllabi) and a provocative engagement with the question of what introductory courses can and should be.

Makes the case for maintaining - even while re-imagining and re-inventing - the place of the survey as a transformative experience for literature students. Through essays both practical and theoretical, the collection presents survey teachers with an exciting range of new strategies for energizing their teaching and engaging their students.

The sixty-three fiction writers and poets within this anthology delve deep into the many senses of place that modern West Virginia, the core of Appalachia, inspires. These stories and poems, all published within the last fifteen years, are grounded in what it means to live in and identify with a complex place.

With a foreword by Denise Giardina On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years--a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated the Appalachian coalfields since coal was first discovered there. And the cycle continues unabated as coal companies bury the most insidious dangers deep underground, all in search of higher profits, and hide the true costs from regulators, unions, and investors alike. But the disaster at Upper Big Branch goes beyond the coalfields of West Virginia. It casts a global shadow, calling into bitter question why coal miners in the United States are sacrificed to erect cities on the other side of the world, why the coal wars have been allowed to rage, polarizing the country, and how the world's voracious appetite for energy is satisfied at such horrendous cost. With Thunder on the Mountain, Peter A. Galuszka pieces together the true story of greed and negligence behind the tragedy at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and in doing so he has created a devastating portrait of an entire industry that exposes the coal-black motivations that led to the death of twenty-nine miners and fuel the ongoing war for the world's energy future. This paperback edition contains a foreword by Denise Giardinia that provides an update on Massey Energy and Donald Blankenship, Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company during the UBB disaster, and recounts her own experiences with Massey Energy and the United Mine Workers Association in the 1980s. This edition also includes a notes section and a bibliography.

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Monongah, West Virginia mine disaster, the West Virginia University Press is honored to carry Davitt McAteer's definitive history of the worst industrial accident in U.S. history. "Monongah" documents the events that led to the explosion, which claimed hundreds of lives on the morning of December 6, 1907.Nearly thirty years of exhaustive research have led McAteer to the conclusion that close to 500 men and boys--many of them immigrants--lost their lives that day, leaving hundreds of women widowed and more than one thousand children orphaned. McAteer delves deeply into the personalities, economic forces, and social landscape of the mining communities of north central West Virginia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tragedy at Monongah led to a greater awareness of industrial working conditions, and ultimately to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which Davitt McAteer helped to enact.

One day, Jesse Donaldson wakes up in Portland, Oregon, and asks his wife to uproot their life together and move to his native Kentucky. As he searches for the reason behind this sudden urge, Donaldson examines both the place where he was born and the life he's building.

Untapped collects twelve previously unpublished essays that analyze the rise of craft beer from social and cultural perspectives. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe there has been exponential growth in the number of small independent breweries over the past thirty years - a reversal of the corporate consolidation and narrowing of consumer choice that characterized much of the twentieth century. While there are legal and policy components involved in this shift, the contributors to Untapped ask broader questions. How does the growth of craft beer connect to trends like the farm-to-table movement, gentrification, the rise of the "creative class," and changing attitudes toward both cities and farms? How do craft beers conjure history, place, and authenticity? At perhaps the most fundamental level, how does the rise of craft beer call into being new communities that may challenge or reinscribe hierarchies based on gender, class, and race?

Few know the name Anna Jarvis, yet we mail the card, buy the flowers, place the phone call, or make the brunch reservation to honour our mothers, all because of her. Memorializing Motherhood explores the complicated history of Anna Jarvis's movement to establish and control Mother's Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.

The characters within these fifteen stories are in one way or another staring into the abyss. While some are awaiting redemption, others are fully complicit in their own undoing. We come upon them in the mountains of West Virginia, in the backyards of rural North Carolina, and at tourist traps along Route 66, where they smolder with hidden desires and struggle to resist the temptations that plague them. A Melungeon woman has killed her abusive husband and drives by the home of her son's new foster family, hoping to lure the boy back. An elderly couple witnesses the end-times and is forced to hunt monsters if they hope to survive. A young girl "tanning and manning" with her mother and aunt resists being indoctrinated by their ideas about men. A preacher's daughter follows in the footsteps of her backsliding mother as she seduces a man who looks a lot like the devil. A master of Appalachian dialect and colloquial speech, Monks writes prose that is dark, taut, and muscular, but also beguiling and playful. Monsters in Appalachia is a powerful work of fiction.