In West Virginia, a state where most everything comes at a cost, there are no simple solutions, and in his new story collection, Allegheny Front, Matthew Neill Null does not shy away from the contradictions and complexities that make this region both so troubled and so extraordinary.

A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.

My burnt body hangs crisscross over Carolina beach dunes below where 
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust 
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another 
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day 
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead 

This week, the editors are listening to Chris Maxwell and Brandy Clark; dreaming of Appalachian cuisine; and remembering The Greatest. 

Besides the fact that white doves are rare in East Kentucky (unless they are being released from wire cages at your mine-site nuptials), this dove sent a cold chill across Cowan because he’d arrived none other than on the day after Ralph Stanley passed.

“My father was a coal miner for thirty-five years and died of black lung,” Howard told me, while resting from the heat and overhead brushstrokes of the outdoor mural he’s working on for a local food pantry. “When I [told my father] I wanted to study art—well, that wasn’t well received.”

The series Its Hills and Valleys  by Matthew Jessie presents images of the photographer’s native East Tennessee. In his work, Jessie seeks to correct false representations the Appalachian region has contended with for decades.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

The Kentucky I knew looked verdant and sun-dappled as my family drove through the palisades and then the gentle bluegrass on our way to the mountains from the city of Louisville. And even when we reached the mountains themselves, which so physically display the significance of shadow and mystery, I was still in a place that all the grownups around me treasured for its nurturing, its sustenance, its mothering. Even those who’d lived away for decades, in other states, in other countries, still called the mountains “home” because that was what they believed.

In Rabun, Jennifer Garza-Cuen photographs a community in northern Georgia, a place “steeped in the cultural specifics associated with both the Deep South and Appalachia.”

In Silent Ballad: Time Sings in the Cumberland Plateau, Rachel Boillot explores Appalachia, photographing East Tennessee’s musical heritage along the mountain roads between Signal Mountain and Cumberland Gap.  

The 2016 news cycle published many articles and images of Eastern Kentucky as both white and poor. However, the town of Lynch, an historically African American community in Harlan County that was established in 1917 by the U.S. Coal and Coke Company, stands strong.