Excerpt from Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser

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Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser was published by West Virginia University Press in April 2026. Edited by Stefania Heim and Catherine Gander, the book is the first volume to comprehensively consider the continued urgency and lasting legacy of Rukeyser’s work as a key source and inspiration for poets working today. In lyric and braided essays, scholarly critique, hybrid investigations, documentary collages, and collaborative poetry, these poets dive deeply into Muriel Rukeyser’s work and life to interrogate, explore, and challenge the models she provides for thinking and writing in our own social, political, and poetic moment. Contributors to the book include Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Catherine Gander, Stacy Hardy, Stefania Heim, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Solmaz Sharif, and Nomi Stone. Below are the opening sections of Gander’s braided essay on learning from Rukeyser about fear, death, childbirth, and breaking social taboos.

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A Q&A with Dean Mark Paris

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by Raithlyn Godfrey

You’ve said that growing up in a rural community shaped your views on access. How have those views changed over the course of your career? Did your rural upbringing inform your decision to take the job in West Virginia?

My views on the value and importance of access haven’t really changed. Growing up in a rural community, where people often lacked access to information or needed help navigating what was available, has always grounded and motivated my work in libraries.

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Annotated Bibliography for Helen Kapstein’s Petroforms: Oil and the Shaping of Nigerian Aesthetics

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by Helen Kapstein

What follows is an annotated bibliography, of the kind you were asked to write in college for a term paper. Here, it’s a cheat sheet to the best, most compelling, strangest examples of what I call “petroforms,” in my new book by that title. Petroforms are aesthetic petroleum products. They are art forms that can only exist because they have been profoundly shaped by their efforts to grapple with the oil industry. Like plastics, lubricants, solvents, and pharmaceuticals, they are, in a way, by-products of crude oil. At the same time, and sometimes paradoxically, they exist in tension with oil, challenging its authority, its omnipresence, and its impact. This highly subjective list draws from Petroforms’ bibliography, concentrating on primary sources, not petrocriticism, with a few new items added in.Read More »

OFF-CAMPUS VISIT: Worthwhile Books from Other University Presses

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by Mo Daviau

I feel protective of the university press. They are bastions of truth and beauty! An institutional gem! Sure, most of what university presses publish is academic work, but there are plenty of titles that are of interest to the general reader, especially works of fiction and creative nonfiction that are heady and risky and interesting. After joining the West Virginia University Press family, I’ve made it a point to seek out books from university presses to share with friends and customers at the bookstore where I work.

Here is a short but sweet list of the non-WVUP books that caught my eye and dazzled my heart in 2025, plus few I’m looking forward to in 2026.

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Opalescence: Finding Well-Being in What I Wear

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by Renée K. Nicholson

I once had a rheumatologist who always asked me what I was reading. If I was animated about a book, he knew that my well-being was probably in a good place. When I failed to mention a book that had recently captivated my interest, he’d probe a bit to see how I was doing. In this way, he saw me as “Renée, his patient,” rather than just another appointment in his busy day. This kind of interaction reminds me of the Connective Tissue series, for which I have the privilege to serve as series editor for WVU Press. My goal is to help curate the best resources that connect the arts and humanities with our experiences of health, illness, and medicine.

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My Appalachia: Nevermore

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by William H. Turner

“The Raven”, that famous Gothic narrative poem [i], captured a good bit of the spirit behind my memoir, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. As melancholy as it sounds, I, like the narrator in Poe’s poem, now in my 80th year, often find myself spending many wee hours “downcast,” as I ponder—quite sapped and drained, often grieving over the volumes of my experiences in my otherwise quaint and now almost forgotten hometown, Lynch, in Harlan County, Kentucky. Ravens—which represent grief, loss, death, and the supernatural in folklore and mythology—were plentiful on Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak, which loomed above Lynch not unlike a part of the sky.Read More »

Excerpt from Corinna Cook’s Permafrost Is an Archive

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We’re pleased to feature this excerpt from Permafrost Is an Archive by Corinna Cook. At once intimate and expansive, Permafrost Is an Archive moves across landscapes both frozen and remembered, tracing the ways history, environment, and personal narrative are layered like ice—preserved, fractured, and revealed over time. We’re excited to offer readers an early look at a book that thoughtfully engages questions of preservation, climate, and narrative form. Permafrost Is an Archive is available for purchase now ahead of its official release on February 24, and we invite you to read the excerpt below and order your copy.

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An Interview with Rachel Weaver

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by Mo Daviau

Rachel Weaver’s beautiful and harrowing memoir Dizzy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the American medical establishment. Stricken with constant, unexplained dizziness, Weaver pursues every avenue of treatment she can find. Her narrative charts nearly two decades of false starts, misdiagnoses, and worsening symptoms, alongside other aspects of Weaver’s life—her work in the Alaskan wilderness, writing and publishing a novel, and becoming a mother to twins.

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Getting to Know Meredith McCarroll

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by Marguerite Avery and Mo Daviau

West Virginia University Press is thrilled to welcome Meredith McCarroll to our acquisitions team. As co-editor of our bestselling title, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, McCarroll has demonstrated her dedication to and deep understanding of Appalachia as a region and a culture. In her new role, she will be acquiring Appalachian titles for the press, and we cannot think of a better person for the job! To introduce her, we asked Meredith a few questions about her writing, research, and vision for the future of Appalachian Studies.Read More »