Echoes of Appalachia

A growing number of writers, poets, musicians, and filmmakers from Appalachia are pushing back against long-held stereotypes about their home—one story, song, or frame at a time.

Their work doesn’t dwell in nostalgia or frame the region as broken. Instead, it brings nuance, complexity, and contradiction to a place often reduced to caricature.

“We’re not here to romanticize poverty or beg for attention,” one author said at a recent reading in Berea. “We’re here to be heard on our own terms.”

The tradition isn’t new. Decades ago, writers like Breece D’J Pancake and bell hooks gave voice to Appalachian experience with raw, unsentimental truth. hooks, from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, wrote about race, feminism, and place with clarity that echoed across the country. Pancake’s short stories, filled with loneliness and grit, became cult classics.

Today, the baton is being carried forward by a new generation.

Silas House, Kentucky’s current poet laureate, writes fiction rooted in small-town life that explores climate, identity, and queerness. His latest novels have earned national acclaim—and pushed back on the idea that rural equals conservative.

Crystal Wilkinson, a Black Appalachian writer and former poet laureate, has gained attention for her work spotlighting Black life in the region—a history often erased. Her poetry and fiction blend place, history, and voice in ways that are both intimate and political.

Musicians like Tyler Childers and Rhiannon Giddens are reaching national audiences while singing about addiction, poverty, and resistance without glorifying any of it. Giddens, a Grammy-winning artist, uses her platform to talk about the overlooked contributions of Black and Indigenous people in Southern music.

Independent filmmakers are telling their own stories too. In Whitesburg, a media collective is helping young people document everything from flooding to family life. Their short films have played at festivals from Louisville to New York.

“This region isn’t a museum or a problem to solve,” said a filmmaker whose documentary on opioid recovery recently won a regional award. “It’s full of artists, thinkers, and builders who’ve been ignored too long.”

At a time when Appalachia is often politicized in national media, these creators are offering something more honest. Their work doesn’t deny the region’s struggles—but it refuses to let those struggles define it entirely.

“We’ve been written about for a hundred years,” the poet said. “It’s time we write ourselves.”

A Quiet Glory

This place don’t ask for much,
just that you notice—
how the fog holds the holler like a mother,
how the creek keeps talking even when nobody listens.
There’s holiness in a woodstove’s hum,
in the porch light left on just in case.

You won’t find the mountains braggin’.
They stand quiet, like old folks
who’ve seen too much to speak quick.
They know sorrow’s just another kind of knowing.
And that beauty don’t need ceremony.

My uncle used to say
every ridge has a memory tucked inside it,
a coal seam that whispers names
no one writes down anymore.
But I still hear them—
in the hush between whip-poor-wills,
in the tobacco barn’s sigh.

We make do.
We hold fast.
We carry our dead with us—
not in grief, but in gratitude.
Their songs come out in the way
we stir the soup pot
or hum low while hanging clothes.

There is no polished ending here.
No neat bow on the story.
Just morning glories crawling up the porch rail,
a half-split stack of wood,
and a road that bends,
always out of sight.

Poem and story written by Tim Carmichael