100 Days in Appalachia

Five Years After It Became a National Park, There’s a Growing Divide In West Virginia’s New River Gorge

Many long-time West Virginians see the divide between their reality of the area — a community that still faces long-standing ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Commentary: Poetry Gives Words to the Language of Survival for Appalachians

I live in Birmingham, Alabama, in the shadow of Red Mountain. As far as mountains go, it’s a bump on the landscape. From my front door, it would take maybe an hour and a half to walk up and over it ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Rural Tennessee is Losing More Hospitals Than Anywhere in the Country, But COVID-19 Isn’t Fully to Blame

This is the third story in Critical Condition, a three part series. Read more here. “I’m hopin’,” Andrea Haas says with conviction. The Remote Area Medical clinic has come to Jellico, Tennessee, in ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Federal COVID Money Could Help Solve One Largely Black Community’s Complex Problems. W.Va. Leaders Invested it Elsewhere.

Karen Williams’ father, Charles Price, was the first Black graduate of West Virginia University’s College of Law, one of two land grant institutions in the state. His office once sat on Court Street, ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Tyler Childers’ Appalachia: How the Country Singer Challenges our Relationships with Addiction and Religion

The first time I heard Tyler Childers’ voice I was riding in the passenger seat of a 15-year-old car late at night through the back roads of West Virginia. It was 2019, and I was 17 years old. And ...
100 Days in Appalachia

In West Virginia’s Southern Coalfields, a Grassroots ‘Jubilee’

On a late spring day in 2022, Rev. Brad Davis was riding along the twisting roads of McDowell County, West Virginia. Davis was soon to start his current job pastoring five United Methodist churches ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Holler, Y’all and Appalachian Drawls: My Childhood of Code Switching in Appalachia

When I was in elementary school, a teacher told me that I needed to speak “properly.” She said my twang made me sound unintelligent. When I began serving on a state leadership board for high school ...
100 Days in Appalachia

‘This Isn’t a Dying Coal Town,’ It’s a West Virginia Community Rethinking Health Care and Succeeding

This is the first story in Critical Condition, a three part series. Read more here. In his history of Williamson, West Virginia, Okey P. Keadle – a member of Williamson High School’s inaugural, 1918, ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Q&A: The West Virginian Keeping Appalachian History Alive Through Storytelling

In Appalachia, storytelling and folklore has served as an important tool and perpetual reminder of who and what makes up the region’s history. That is one of the many reasons award-winning storyteller ...
100 Days in Appalachia

What is the New Apostolic Reformation? How a Religio-Political Movement is Affecting U.S. and Appalachian Politics

Apostles and prophets. Spiritual warfare. Dominionism and the New Apostolic Reformation. You might come across these terms if you follow politics these days. Here’s some context and clarity about the ...
100 Days in Appalachia

Documenting the Appalachian Intifada: A Review of ‘So Much to be Angry About’

Liberation movements around the world and throughout history have always created our own media: to tell our own stories, to teach our own people and to strengthen our movements and organizations. In ...