Julia Watts

In rural Kentucky, a sixteen-year-old boy with a love of quilting, cooking and Dolly Parton helps his grandma care for his opioid-addicted mother, until the discovery of a family secret upends everything he has ever believed. While other sixteen-year-old boys in Morgan, Kentucky, love hunting and football, Kody prefers to spend his time quilting with his grandmother ("Nanny"), watching Golden Girls reruns, and listening to old Dolly Parton albums. Nanny is Kody's main caregiver, but it takes both Nanny and Kody to take care of Kody's mother, whose drug problem is spinning out of control. Between looking after Mommy and trying to survive in a place that doesn't look kindly on feminine boys, Kody already has a hard time making sense of his life. But then he uncovers a family secret that will change everything in his life.

Needlework

A compelling LGBTQ YA novel by LAMBDA award-winning author Julia Watts, that explores the unlikely friendship between Libby, the oldest child in a rural Tennessee family of strict evangelical Christians, and Zo, her gender fluid new neighbor.

Quiver

Jeff Mann

This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple. With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.

Lgbtq Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia

Sixteen-year-old Heavenly Faith Simms is slowly suffocating in the small town in which she grew up. Abandoned by her mother and raised by her loving but religiously zealous grandmother, HF has never felt like she belonged anywhere so when she finds her mother's address in a drawer, she is determined to start a new life in Florida with the mother she has never known. She and her best friend, Bo, an emotionally repressed gay boy, hit the road and head south and both awake to the realisation that there is a life awaiting them that is very different to what they have known.

Finding H.F.

In 1944, sixteen-year-old Ruby and her family move to Oak Ridge, Tennessee where Ruby finds a friend in twenty-three-year-old housewife Iris, but the emotional intensity of their relationship deepens until it becomes a dangerous secret.

Secret City

When Lily's lover, Charlotte, is killed in a tragic car accident, Charlotte's homophobic family threatens to exert their legal rights and seize custody of their daughter's biological child, Mimi. Griefstricken over the loss of her lover, Lily vows to do anything she can to keep from losing her beloved daughter too.The solution? A marriage of convenience to her Bugle Boy-wearing, trust fund-spending gay neighbor, Ben, and a quick move to Ben's hometown in rural Georgia where his powerful family will ensure that their new "daughter-in-law" gets custody of Mimi. Provided, that is, that the two can convince Ben's parents that their marriage is the real thing.Living as a married couple, Lily and Ben soon discover the outrageous perks and pitfalls of compulsory heterosexuality. Determined to keep up appearances in order to keep her child, Lily ignores her own inner needs -- until a beautiful country veterinarian offers her a prescription for some sexual healing.

Wedding Bell Blues

Lovesick Blossoms

General Fiction. A woman looks back at her life and realizes that she had been given a chance at love after all.

Kind of Girl I Am

Barbara Johnson

Karin Kallmaker

Therese Szymanski

In this first installment of a planned annual series of New Exploits of... novellas, authors put a new twist on the classic fairy tales Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast. Fish Out of Water (Kallmaker); Nobody believed the curse that the evil warlock put on Ariel until it came true. On her twenty-first birthday she awoke in a strange bed, next to a mortal woman, in a land that bore no resemblance to her own. She must not speak for a year, no matter the need, or she will never be able to go home again. And home has much to offer: her crown, her magic, and the endless pleasures of the Sidhe Court. The memories of the glorious, wonderfully irresponsible, luxurious days and nights keep her silent... until the love, and lovemaking, of that very mortal woman, leaves her yearning to say just one word: Yes. A Butch in Fairytale Land (Szymanski); Need help? Cody is there. Friends call her misguided. Ex-friends say stalker. Chided on every side for acting before she thinks, Cody is delighted to awaken in a fairy tale world where damsel after damsel not only needs help, but Cody is the only butch around to save the day. Daring deeds and dashing rescues can

New Exploits of Fairy Tale Lesbians

Once Upon a Dyke

Leaving home was the best decision Chrys Pickett ever made. She lost her rural accent, got a PhD. and made something of herself, promising she'd never go back to her roots. But when your Nanny needs you and your heart has been smashed to pieces, promises are easily dismissed. The loud, affectionate family welcome and simple Appalachian life--cookouts and church, chickens and dogs in the yard--is just what Chrys needs. She's done with love and family is what matters. Nanny is the one who cooked and cleaned for her when she was little and she doesn't mind caring for Nanny...just for the summer. What she doesn't expect are unsettling family secrets--and being hit between the eyes with an intense attraction to Nanny's physical therapist. Hilarious and poignant, this new novel by Lambda Literary Award winner Julia Watts chronicles a woman's struggle to make sense of who she has become as she is found by love in the place least expected.

Hypnotizing Chickens

A Novel

bell hooks

Dorothy Allison

Connie May Fowler

Jayne Anne Phillips

Michael Croley

Silas House

Carter Sickels

Chris Offutt

Jason Howard

Ann Pancake

Aaron Smith

Lisa Lewis

Crystal Wilkinson

Charles Dodd White

Pinckney Benedict

Mary Crockett Hill

Melissa Range

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Joyce Dyer

Jacinda Townsend

Jessie van Eerden

David Huddle

Sheldon Lee Compton

Sarah Einstein

Jane Springer

Richard Currey

Rob Amberg

RJ Gibson

Tennessee Jones

Ida Stewart

In Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray collect essays from today’s finest established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia. Together, these essays take the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture, whether the details of that theme revolve around faith, class, work, or family legacies.

In essays that take wide-ranging forms—making this an ideal volume for creative nonfiction classes—contributors write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken. They consider the courage required for the inheritances they carry.

Toughness and generosity alike characterize works by Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Silas House, and others. These writers travel far away from the boundaries of a traditional Appalachia, and then circle back—always—to the mountains that made each of them the distinctive thinking and feeling people they ultimately became. The essays in Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean are an individual and collective act of courage.

Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia

Walk Til the Dogs Get Mean

A hilarious and heartwarming tale of lesbian culture shock, the resiliency of true love, and the maddening gap between coming out and being out.

Wildwood Flowers

"To be honest, my friends were getting on my nerves. Here I was, trying to get my mind off a woman, and they bring me to a lesbian bar where they talk about nothing but lesbians and sex. It was like they were forcing me to think about the one thing I didn't want to think about. As though I'd said, 'Look, the only thing I don't want to think about is hippopotamuses, ' and so to distract me, they took me to the zoo". -- from the book

Piece of My Heart

Growing up dirt poor in a Kentucky coal mining camp in the 1940s has made Glenda Mooney hungry for everything that life has to offer. She discovers early on the two vital forces that will sustain her throughout her life, music and love, in the arms of a preacher's daughter.

Phases of the Moon

It is the fall semester of 1990, and three students named Elizabeth are on the roll for professor Angela Rivers' Women in Literature course at William Blount University. Like so many college students, each of these 'Elizabeths' is on a journey of self-discovery which will determine the course of the rest of their lives.

Women's Studies

Robin Lippincott

When the pressures of small-town life in the Bible Belt build, can Rufus and Syd trust in each other and stand together?

Rufus + Syd

Fiction. LGBT Studies. "Julia Watts breaks into the mainstream with a trip to planet parenthood in her latest novel, GIFTED AND TALENTED. Provocatively focusing her gimlet eye on the old Nature vs. Nurture question, Watts' comedic flair also hits pay dirt that as rich as the Appalachian soil."—Robin Lippincott "GIFTED AND TALENTED slyly considers the definition of sanity in the context of gifted education for children. Cheerfully irreverent and broadly empathetic, this page turner is an extraordinary combination of brilliant comedy and cautionary tale. Characters are too rich, thin, poor, smart, New Age, religious, and driven, yet it's the steady alternative families who exhibit wisdom and live life so lustily it creates envy in the reader. Should third graders be asked to perform to such impossible standards? Anyone who has been there and done that will nod in recognition while appreciating the devilishly good prose of the very gifted and talented Ms. Watts."—Lynn Pruett

Gifted and Talented

When the new Mexican restaurant in the town of Wilder is vandalized, Miranda, who can see other people's thoughts, and her friends Adam and Abigail, investigate who might hate Wilder's Latino population enough to perpetrate the attacks.

Free Spirits

Between dusk and dark lies another world. Haunted castles and lost ingenues, shadows hungry for life, immortal beings of power claiming their captive souls - everything is possible when the sun goes down."

Julia Watts

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