For twenty years, diners in the Bluegrass have been able to satisfy their cravings for Ouita Michel's sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine at her many acclaimed restaurants. Each restaurant -- from Wallace Station to Holly Hill Inn -- features dishes that combine Kentucky's bounty with Michel's celebrated vision. Diners can enjoy traditional southern staples like buttermilk biscuits, country ham, and Po-Boy sandwiches, or opt for unique variations on international favorites and American classics. Now, readers around the country can experience what makes Ouita Michel a culinary and cultural treasure. Just a Few Miles South serves up the recipes that patrons of Michel's restaurants have come to know and love, including the Bluegrass Benedict breakfast sandwich, Ouita's Sardou Panini, Wallace Station's Creamy Chicken and Mushroom Soup, and Honeywood's Hoecake Burger. Some dishes offer creative twists on classics, like the Inside Out Hot Brown, the Wallace Cubano, or the Bourbon Banh Mi. Throughout, the chefs responsible for these delicious creations share the rich traditions and stories behind the recipes. When you can't get down to your favorite place, this book will help you bring home the aroma, the flavors, and the love of fresh foods made with locally sourced ingredients -- and share it all with friends and family.

Skillfully divided into three distinct yet harmonious parts, cantillating local, familial, and personal histories, Girl Singer is a collection of lyrical and descriptive poems that offer unique insight on famous and infamous Appalachian tales from this life and the next.

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. The experience introduces him to the beautiful and enigmatic Essie Stamper-a young Cherokee woman who is also working at the inn and dreaming of a better life.
With World War II raging in Europe, the resort is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. A secret room becomes a place where Cowney and Essie can escape the white world of the inn and imagine their futures free of the shadows of their families' pasts. Outside of this refuge, however, racism and prejudice are never far behind, and when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing, Cowney finds himself accused of abduction and murder.
Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, and flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides. Betrayed by the friends he trusted, he begins to unearth deeper mysteries as he works to prove his innocence and clear his name. This richly written debut novel explores the immutable nature of the human spirit and the idea that physical existence, with all its strife and injustice, will not be humanity's lasting legacy.

The traditional neighborly work of killing a hog and preparing it as food for humans is either a fine art or a shameful mess. It requires knowledge, experience, skill, good sense, and sympathy, writes Wendell Berry in the essay portion of this book. In November 1979 as in years before, neighborly families gathered to do one of the ceremonious jobs of farm life: hog killing. Tanya Berry had been given a camera by New Farm magazine to photograph Kentucky farmers at work, and for two days at the farm of Owen and Loyce Flood in Henry County, she captured this culmination of a year's labor raising livestock. Here, in the resulting photographs, published for the first time, the American agrarian tradition is shown at its most harmonious, with strong men and women toiling with shared purpose towards a common wealth.

Tanya Berry reveals intimate, expressive moments: the teams of young men hoisting animals by physical strength onto a gambrel and wagon for butchering, women grinding meat and mixing sausage and readying hams for preservation, and the solidarity of human beings coming together in reverence for the food they would eat, the lives and bodies which would be taken, and those which would be strengthened.

They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long.

Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound together by western Kentucky's Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the mid-twentieth-century impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and the seizing of property under the power of eminent domain to create a national recreation area on the narrow strip of land between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects completed in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region-at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns, and history.

The narrative follows two women whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and their stories go back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories emphasize the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.

When Katherine Pettit and May Stone arrived in the rural Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky to engage in social settlement work in the late 1800s, they were unmarried outsiders, living in pitched tents on the side of a hill, and perceived as odd, peculiar -- and quare (the local pronunciation of queer). Yet these strong, capable educators wanted to learn all we can and teach all we can, and in doing so would persevere to establish the Hindman Settlement School in 1902. When Lucy