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Winners of the Weatherford Award for Best Books About Appalachia

Winners of the Weatherford Award for Best Books About Appalachia

Weatherford Awards honor books deemed as best illuminating the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South. Granted by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association for 50 years, the awards commemorate the life and achievements of W.D. Weatherford Sr., a pioneer and leading figure in Appalachian development, youth work and race relations, and his son, Willis D. Weatherford Jr., Berea College’s sixth president.  The poetry award was established in 2010 to honor the life and work of Dr. Grace Toney Edwards, former Director of the Appalachian Regional Studies Center at Radford University.

Current Winners

We are pleased to announce this year’s winners of the 2024 Weatherford Awards! These are separated into 3 categories: fiction, nonfiction and poetry honoring books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.”

Fiction Award

No Perfect Mothers and Rednecks

No Perfect Mothers by Karen Spears Zacharias

Rednecks by Taylor Brown

 

Finalists
  • The Stone Catchers by Laura Leigh Morris

Poetry Award

Finalists
  • Kingfisher’s Blues by Erik Reece
  • The Rain had Nowhere to Go by William Woolfitt
  • Requiem for a Redbird by Torli Bush
What Good is Heaven

By Raye Hendrix

Nonfiction Award

This Book is Free and Yours to Keep

Edited by Connie Banta, Kristin Devault-Juelfs, Destinee Harper, Katy Ryan, and Ellen Skirvin

 

Finalists
  • Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky, Edited by Melissa Helton
  • No Son of Mine by Jonathan Corcoran
  • Affrilachia Testimonies by Chris Aluka Berry, Kelly Elaine Navies, and Maia Surdam

Past Winners