Today we talk to Kendra Winchester, the co-founder and executive director of the 'Reading Women' podcast and a Book Riot contributing editor. But she is also the person behind the Read Appalachia Instagram account. She tells us what makes Appalachian literature special and why it’s so important to her.

You can find Kendra Winchester on various instagram pages including at @readappalachia, @thebookcorgi and @thereadingwomen.

Books Mentioned in this episode:

1- Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2- Percy Jackson & The Olympians by Rick Riordan

3- Sabriel by Garth Nix

4- Books by Tamora Pierce

5- Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

6- Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray

7- Rise to the Sun by Leah Johnson

8- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

9- The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson

10- Affrilachia by Frank X. Walker

11- Southernmost by Silas House

12- Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poets edited by Bianca Lynne Spriggs and Jeremy Paden

13- Water Street by Crystal Wilkinson

14- Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

15- What You're Getting Wrong about Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

16- Step Into the Circle: Writers in Modern Appalachia edited by Amy Greene and Trent Thomson

17- Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

18- Me and Banksy by Tanya Lloyd Kyi

19- Carework: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

20- Disability/Visability: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong

21- The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay & Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein

22- The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death & Faith by Sarah Krasnostein

Podcasts mentioned--

1- Reading Women

Instagram mentioned--

1- @readappalachia

2- @thebookcorgi

TV shows mentioned

1- Explained (Netflix)

Our guest this week, Grace Sammon, has written a novel that tackles this modern dilemma for older women. Titled The Eves, it features a main character named Jessica who struggles with her own aging but is helped along in her journey by a group of even older women whose experiences and insights get Jessica to screw her head on straight again.

You can find Grace Sammon on Instagram at @gracesammonwrites and on Facebook on the group "Bookish Road Trip". You can find links to her radio show at her website www.gracesammon.net.

Books we discuss in this episode:

1- The Eves by Grace Sammon

2- Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

3- Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz

4- Dolly Madison and the War of 1812 by Libby Carty McNamee

5- Susannah’s Midnight Ride: The Girl Who Won the Revolutionary War by Libby Carty McNamee

6- The Spiral Shell: A French Village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II by Sandell Morse

7- Little Tea by Claire Fullerton

8- Mourning Dove by Clair Fullerton

9- Brave Girl, Quiet Girl by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Podcasts mentioned—

1- The Storytellers with Grace Sammon

Movies mentioned—

1- Nomadland (2020)

Social Media Group

1- The Bookish Road Trip

In this week’s episode, we speak to Elizabeth Senn-Alvey, executive director of Emerging Workforce Initiative, a nonprofit in Louisville that targets ways to help marginalized youth who have systemic or personal issues that could impede their journey into the workforce and develop marketable skills. One of the programs they offer is The Book Works.

The Book Works is a social enterprise, which is a program that helps address local teens and young adults unmet needs such as poverty, homelessness, and limited education through a market-driven approach; or in other words teaching through learning a business.

The Book Works book sale takes place September 18-19. Go to their website at www.thebookworks.org for more details.

You can find The Book Works on instagram at @thebookworkslou or on Facebook at The Book Works Louisville.

Books mentioned in this episode:

1- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

2- Towers Falling by Jewel Parker Rhodes

3- The Awakening by Kate Chopin

4- The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

5- Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

6- Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

7- Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe by Preston Norton

St. Clair Detrick-Jules is a Brown University graduate who is a filmmaker and new author of the book, “My Beautiful Black Hair: 101 Natural Hair Stories from the Sisterhood.” It debuts on September 28 and features essays by and photographs of Black women who have come to some deeper understandings about what their hair and how they wear it means to them.

You can find St. Clair on social media at @stclairdetrickjules or at her website www.mybeautifulblackhair.com.

Lots of people travel around Labor Day and start thinking about fall break adventures so this week’s episode is jam-packed with travel writing. We chat with two guests this week.

Our first guest is not a writer, but a graphic designer who began making cool illustrated posters of national parks on an Instagram account called Subpar Parks. Amber Share couples her illustrations with terrible one-star Yelp reviews those parks receive from visitors who weren’t terribly impressed with majestic things like The Grand Canyon and Old Faithful. Those illustrations have gone viral and she recently collected them all in book format and included facts about each national park from park rangers. Her book, SubPar Parks: America's Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors is a New York Times Bestseller.

Our second guest is writer Suzanne Roberts, who National Geographic named a “Next Great Travel Writer.” Her most recent book, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, has received many awards including the Independent Publisher Book Award and National Indie Excellence Awards. She weaves a story of maturing as a woman and becoming a veteran traveler. Her book will make you laugh but it also gets serious, and those serious essays make her humor seem all the more poignant.

You can find Amber Share on social media at @subparparks or at her website www.ambersharedesign.com. And Suzanne Roberts can be found on instagram @suzanneroberts28 or on her website at www.suzanneroberts.net

This week’s episode is a nod to back-to-school season when teachers can get books into the hands of kids after a summer of free days, endless video games, and probably too many popsicles. We are joined by Melissa Hart from Eugene Oregon. She is the author of 2 memoirs, a middle grade book, and most recently a great resource for teachers, librarians, and parents called 'Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Encourage Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens'.

In this week’s episode, we chat with Sanjay Saverimuttu. He is a ballet dancer with the Louisville Ballet and a choreographer who grew up in South Florida. Sanjay attended college at Stanford and studied Biology but decided dance was really his passion. His other passion is reading and he is the leader of the Louisvile LGBTQ book group sponsored by the Louisville Pride Foundation.

This week we talk with Heather Lennon, the Sales and Marketing Director at Arctis Books, a new publisher of books in translation for middle grade and young adult audiences. I first encountered Arctis books when I saw an instagram post about a middle grade book called Memento Monstrum originally published in German that will be in US bookstores in October. I liked the book so much I messaged Heather and invited her to be on the show to talk about Arctis specifically and books in translation in general.

This week we talk with Brooke Lauren Davis, a debut author whose YA book The Hollow Inside offers some unique characters. There’s Phoenix, the protagonist whose mother, Nina, has led them away from Phoenix’s father and towards a man from Nina’s past named Ellis, a successful and charismatic man who Nina believes ruined her life. It’s a story about truth, trust, family, revenge, and what lengths people will go to to salvage their reputation.

Today our episode feels a little bit like show and tell or career day at school. We are finding out all about what a literary agent does. Our guest this week is Alice Speilburg, the founder of and one of the literary agents at Speilburg Literary Agency in Louisville, Kentucky.