It’s easy to understand why Rhonda Browning White’s debut novel, Filling the Big Empty (Redhawk Publications 2024) was shortlisted for the 2022 Neilson Prize. The novel is a tour-de-force, relentlessly examining environmental issues in Appalachia. While never losing focus on a young couple’s relationship, the story drops readers into the horrors of mountaintop removal to extract coal, the […]
“Beyond Buffalo” by Betsy Reeder
March 6, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Beyond Buffalo by Betsy Reeder takes readers beyond the deaths and physical destruction caused by the Buffalo Creek disaster to explore the long-term psychological impacts on survivors. The Buffalo Creek flood occurred in Logan County, West Virginia, on February 26, 1972, when three coal slurry impoundment dams fail during heavy rainfall, killing 125 and injuring 1,121. Over 4,000 were left homeless. But […]
“Talmadge Farm” by Leo Daughtry
February 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
In a sweeping story set in eastern North Carolina, Leo Daughtry takes readers from 1957 to 1970, a time of convulsive societal change in Talmadge Farm (Story Merchant 2024). As the Vietnam War intensifies, the civil rights movement spreads across the South, reaching even wealthy bank president and tobacco farmer, Gordon Talmadge. North Carolina’s Research […]
“Rowdy Boundaries” by James L. Robinson
February 28, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Every lawyer has stories to tell—alarming, hilarious, intriguing, or just plain peculiar tales of people and events that require legal intervention in one way or another. James L. Robertson has collected a variety of Mississippi’s most notable accounts of law-breaking characters and balanced them out with a few outlandish but little-known episodes. Robertson is well-positioned […]
BettyJoyce Nash interviews Carla Damron, author of “Justice Be Done”
February 24, 2025 by Leave a Comment
Introduction: A social worker, Carla Damron is also an award-winning fiction writer. Her latest book is Justice Be Done (Bella Rosa Press 2023). Her titles also include The Orchid Tattoo (National Indie Excellence Award) and The Stone Necklace (Women Fiction Writers Award, also chosen as One Community Read for Columbia, S.C.) BettyJoyce Nash writes fiction in Charlottesville, […]