Neema Avashia

2 months ago | salvationsouth.com | Neema Avashia |Chuck Reece

Crystal Good and I grew up a few years and a few miles apart in southern West Virginia—she in St. Albans and I across the Kanawha River in Cross Lanes. But I did not know her, or her work, until I was well into adulthood. I came across her 2012 poetry collection, Valley Girl, and found myself back in the same “Chemical Valley” where we grew up. In a lot of ways, Crystal feels like a literary big sibling to me.

Jul 25, 2024 | salvationsouth.com | Neema Avashia

“The reason the South is so repressive is because it is the most radical place in North America,” writes Robin D.G. Kelly, the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. I’d take that one step further and say that Central Appalachia, in particular, is home to some of the most badass, radical folks I know. Chief among those people? Misty Skaggs, whose work I first learned of in the context of the floods that ravaged Eastern Kentucky two years ago this month.

Jul 16, 2024 | theguardian.com | Neema Avashia

Back in 2016, I was an Appalachian expat living in Boston, feeling homesick and displaced like I do most of the time up here. I saw a book in the Harvard Coop with the word Hillbilly on the cover and jumped at it. No one up here knew that word, or if they did, they understood it as derogatory, while I understood it as home. Here home was, I thought, staring me in the face from the front table at a major bookstore.

May 23, 2024 | electricliterature.com | Neema Avashia |Susan Ito |Sejal Shah

There’s a common misconception that university presses only publish academic work–monographs or detailed studies of a single specialized subject or other discipline-specific scholarly books. However, university presses, while housed in universities, also publish a broad range of award-winning books for general audiences, including memoirs, essay collections, novels, short story collections, poetry collections, and hybrid, mixed-genre works.

Mar 23, 2024 | completesentencelit.com | Neema Avashia

By Neema Avashia Baby writhes on the changing table, furious at this momentary loss of bodily control, until she catches sight of the bangles glimmering on my wrists–three on each, two thin, one thick, solid gold engraved with thin filigree, made from my mother’s melted-down wedding jewelry–and grabs hold of a bangle that I then slip off my wrist, slip off a second, hand them to her as distraction while I change her diaper, connected in this instant both to my own mother, and to generations...