More Diverse than You Might Imagine: A Survey of Recent Young-adult Appalachian Literature

Allison Ball* and Rosemary Hathaway

Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26501

Presentation Category: Human Engagement (Poster Presentation #137)

Student’s Major: English and Criminology

For the last several months, we have been attempting to compile a comprehensive bibliography of Appalachian young-adult books. While young-adult literature as a genre has been expanding in recent years, it is difficult to find YA books set in Appalachia--especially ones that don’t conform to stereotypes. To take a closer look at this kind of literature, we have conducted a survey to determine how much YA Appalachian literature has been published over the last few decades and which books are still in print. We discovered that little work has been done describing this literature. The only existing resource we have found for our research is Herrin and Oliver’s 2010 reference book, Appalachian Children’s Literature: An Annotated Bibliography. Although Herrin and Oliver’s book includes many children’s books describing Appalachia and its people, it doesn’t specifically break out YA books separately. We are also looking into different coding systems for listing the books in the bibliography. This poster presentation will define what we mean when we describe a YA novel as being “Appalachian,” and introduce viewers to the many books we’ve come across that fall into this category. Compiling an extensive list and sharing it with viewers allows Appalachians to embrace the range of regional representations in these novels, allows others to see how prevalent this literature is, and debunk negative views of the region. Key to our research is including more texts that include characteristics of Appalachia while also representing diverse groups such as the LGBTQ+ community and other minority communities.

Funding:

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: WVU's Research Apprenticeship Program (RAP) & accompanying HONR 297-level course