West Virginia native Neema Avashia will be joined in conversation by S Brook Corfman to celebrate her debut memoir, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
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When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving, “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality, continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.
Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer, desi, Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.
Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a civics and history teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003.
S. Brook Corfman is the author of My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, one of The New York Times’ Best Poetry Books of 2020, a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Trans & Gender-Variant Lit Award, and the winner of the Fordham University Press POL poetry prize judged by Cathy Park Hong. They are also the author of the collection Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the 2018 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and the chapbooks Frames (Belladonna* #256), Meteorites (DoubleCross Press), and The Anima: Four Closet Dramas (GaussPDF). Born and raised in Chicago, they now live in a turret in Pittsburgh.