FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 15, 2024

Fairmont, WV – Award-winning author Neema Avashia will deliver a literary reading at Pierpont Community and Technical College’s Advanced Technology Center on Thursday, April 11 at 6:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Avashia will read from her book, Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, where she describes her experience navigating life, religion, beauty standards, and gender and sexuality in the Mountain State. In her memoir, she shares the impact of her experiences on how she loves, teaches, advocates, and struggles, as well as the importance of representation in Appalachia.

“What I have to offer students is the premise that Appalachia is full of ‘anothers’–people whose identities and stories fall outside the mainstream representations of what it means to be from Appalachia,” said Avashia. “By telling those stories and amplifying them, we complicate people’s understandings of our home. We make it harder for others to flatten, stereotype, or dehumanize us. We make space for the idea that Appalachia can be a home to many different people, coming from a whole range of identities.”

Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place has been recognized as a Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award.

A question and answer session with Avashia will follow the event.

This literary reading is a collaboration between Pierpont’s Office of Student Involvement and writing program. The collaboration is the first of many, with the hopes of providing a showcase for diverse literary forms and voices in the Mountain State and beyond.

For more information, contact the Office of Student Involvement at studentactivities@pierpont.edu.