West Virginia University Press has just released Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, an anthology edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. Many thanks to Theresa Burriss and the anthology’s editors for including my snarky poem, “Social Capital.” Quite a few Appalachians are profoundly annoyed with how J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is being treated as the ultimate word on the region, and many of the poems and essays in this book reflect that annoyance.
Thanks also go to Jason Howard, editor of Appalachian Heritage, for reprinting my poem “Yellow-Eye Beans” in the Fall 2018 issue of that magazine. The poem appears in a section called “Featured Poets: The Naturalists,” and I’m in super company with Maggie Anderson, Irene McKinney, Marc Harshman, Louise McNeill, Richard Hague, James Still, and others.