Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. This collection of essays allows Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography.

The book moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to provide a deeply personal portrait of Appalachia—a place that is culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. It complicates simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, making clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original thoughts on race, beauty, money, and more—by one of today's most intrepid public intellectuals.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, the writer, professor, and acclaimed author of Lower Ed, now brilliantly shifts gears from running regression analyses on college data to unleashing another identity: a purveyor of wit, wisdom—and of course Black Twitter snark—about all that is right and much that is so very wrong about this thing we call society. In the bestselling tradition of bell hooks and Roxane Gay, McMillan Cottom’s freshman collection illuminates a particular trait of her tribe: being thick. In form, and in substance.

This bold compendium, likely to find its place on shelves alongside Lindy West, Rebecca Solnit, and Maggie Nelson, dissects everything from beauty to Obama to pumpkin spice lattes. Yet Thick will also fill a void on those very shelves: a modern black American female voice waxing poetic on self and society, serving up a healthy portion of clever prose and southern aphorisms in a style uniquely her own.

McMillan Cottom has crafted a black woman’s cultural bible, as she mines for meaning in places many of us miss and reveals precisely how—when you’re in the thick of it—the political, the social, and the personal are almost always one and the same.