Appalachian Reckoning

A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy

This is a book born out of frustration. This is a book born out of hope. It attempts to speak for no one and to give voice to many. This is a book that could have emerged without Hillbilly Elegy, but it was also created in the explicit context of a post-election, post–Hillbilly Elegy moment. It therefore attempts to respond to those who have felt they understand Appalachia “now that they have read Hillbilly Elegy” and to push back against and complicate those understandings.

Appalachian Reckoning is meant to open a conversation about why Hillbilly Elegy struck such a deep nerve with many in the region, but it is not meant to demonize J.D. Vance. Instead, the contributors to this book prioritize focusing on the region, reclaiming some of the talk about Appalachia, and offering ideas through the voices of many who have deep, if varied, lived experiences in and of Appalachia.

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.

Appalachian Reckoning was published in 2019 by West Virginia University Press, wvupressonline.com/appalachian-reckoning.