By Ron Roach | Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and Magura in the Piatra Craiului Mountains of Romania may seem worlds apart. Yet, these two mountain communities share similar landscapes, histories, stories of preservation and ...

By Lacy Snapp | Nickole Brown is a poet whose voice is a contemporary, vital presence in our Appalachian writing community as her poems often include a speaker who holds up a curious and reverent magnifying glass to the more-than-human world. Brown is the executive director of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a new ecological writing festival ...

By Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller | When we think of Appalachian places we normally look to the highlands of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and other Southern mountain states. Often overlooked are the communities of Appalachians in Midwestern cities ...

By Ophelia Thornton | For most U.S. towns and cities established during the 1800s, railroads served as critical arteries for creating, growing and sustaining community life. Although establishing ...

By Ron R. Roach | The small mountain communities of Butler, Tennessee, and Rosia Montana, Romania, are more than 5,000 miles apart, but ...

By Mark Rutledge and Ophelia Thornton | A century-old photo album that traveled from the nation’s eastern mountains to the Mid-West...

By E.J. Swatsell | Throughout history, human existence has been recorded by material culture — the physical objects, spaces, and ...

By Lydia Hamby | In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s devastating impact on many Appalachian communities in Western North Carolina and ...

By Geraldine Glodek | Ronan Doyle, born in 1919, was a curious five-year-old packed into a coal-company home with his immigrant ...

By Ophelia Thornton | Shortly before the Doe River reaches its confluence with the Watauga River, it flows under what is arguably Upper ...

During the early 1980s, Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander was promoting a plan for increasing the quality of public education in the state...

By Ophelia Thornton | As East Tennessee State University’s Center for Appalachian Studies and Services celebrates its 40th year, one of ...

By Donna Davis | One hundred years ago, a baby was born who was instrumental in putting Shelby, North Carolina, on the map. What Elvis ...

By Mark Rutledge | While students and alumni of Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies at East Tennessee State University were ...

By Shara Lange | In 2013, internationally renowned artist Patrick Dougherty came to East Tennessee State University’s campus and worked ...

Lyric Essays draw on poetic literary devices, including imagery, music, word play, compression, and extended metaphors.

By Robert Morgan | The police quit looking for me. They gave up and pretended I was no longer hiding on the island. It was about a year ...

By Donna Davis | Over the river and through the woods is a land of horses, Virginia’s two tallest mountains, and ambivalent cell phone ...

 By Mark Rutledge | When 15-year-old Jamison Smith arrived at East Tennessee State University’s first ever Bluegrass Summer Camp in July ...

By Sandra Laws | Jackie Paxton Rose never knew her grandmother, but when her mother passed away in 2018, she inherited a box that would ...