Getting acquainted with local flora and fauna is the perfect way to begin to understand the wonder of nature. The natural environment of Southern Appalachia, with habitats that span the Blue Ridge to the Cumberland Plateau, is one of the most biodiverse on earth. A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia—a hybrid literary and natural history anthology—showcases sixty of the many species indigenous to the region. Ecologically, culturally, and artistically, Southern Appalachia is rich in paradox and stereotype-defying complexity. Its species range from the iconic and inveterate—such as the speckled trout, pileated woodpecker, copperhead, and black bear—to the elusive and endangered—such as the American chestnut, Carolina gorge moss, chucky madtom, and lampshade spider. The anthology brings together art and science to help the reader experience this immense ecological wealth. Stunning images by seven Southern Appalachian artists and conversationally written natural history information complement contemporary poems from writers such as Ellen Bryant Voigt, Wendell Berry, Janisse Ray, Sean Hill, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Deborah A. Miranda, Ron Rash, and Mary Oliver. Their insights illuminate the wonders of the mountain South, fostering intimate connections. The guide is an invitation to get to know Appalachia in the broadest, most poetic sense.

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognize and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science. A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this guide introduces the reader to seventy indigenous species found in Northern Appalachia, a region comprising parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a hybrid literary and natural history anthology, the book consists of descriptions and notes on habitat, range, and ecology provided by six scientists with expertise in the region’s flora and fauna. In addition, eleven artists and seventy poets have provided original artwork and poetry that illuminate the lives of the greater-than-human world. Defying easy stereotypes, the guide presents trees, shrubs, wildflowers and mammals, birds and fish, reptiles and amphibians, and invertebrates and fungi. Love and wonder for these ancient mountains and their ever-evolving residents flood the pages of this book, inviting the reader into a deeper way of knowing a place and the lives dependent on it.

The outdoors come to life in this collection of stories, games, crafts, investigations, and hands-on activities meant to accompany excursions into the fields, forests, and wetlands of southern Appalachia. The region’s rich natural diversity is highlighted, from its low-elevation coves to its highland ridges and balds. Because the southern Appalachian Mountains provide diverse habitats for plants and animals, every visit presents a new adventure. With an emphasis on the importance of a good conservation ethic along with suggestions on how to get involved in community conservation efforts, explorers of all ages can learn about topics such as plants, animals, microscopic life, life after dark, and environmental awareness.

Winner of Weatherford Award for Best Poetry Book about Appalachia A poet acclaimed for "uncompromising, honest poems that sound like no one else" (The Rumpus) now offers considerations of the natural world and humans' place within it in ecopoetry of both ambitious reach and elegant refinement Rose McLarney has won attention as a poet of impressive insight, craft, and a "constantly questioning and enlarging vision" (Andrew Hudgins). In her third collection, Forage, she continues to weave together themes she loves: home, heritage, the South, animals, water, the environment. These intricately sequenced poems take up everything from animals' symbolic roles in art and as indicators of ecological change to how water can represent a large, troubled system or the exceptions of smaller, purer tributaries. At the confluence of these poems is a social commentary that goes beyond lamenting environmental degradation and disaster to record--and augment--the beauty of the world in which we live.

Part natural history, part poetry, Mountains of the Heart is full of hidden gems and less traveled parts of the Appalachian Mountains Stretching almost unbroken from Alabama to Belle Isle, Newfoundland, the Appalachians are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. In Mountains of the Heart, renowned author and avid naturalist Scott Weidensaul shows how geology, ecology, climate, evolution, and 500 million years of history have shaped one of the continent's greatest landscapes into an ecosystem of unmatched beauty. This edition celebrates the book's 20th anniversary of publication and includes a new foreword from the author.

A haunting, intimate, and beautifully-crafted collection of poems rooted in southern Appalachia that reflects on loss and remembrance—and reaches beyond the constraints of time and place Rose McLarney’s fourth collection of poems, Colorfast, reckons with fading and bleeding away, the gray of aging and the gray areas to which truths are relegated. McLarney reconsiders girlhood stories, acknowledges omissions from Southern history, and studies the silences of women’s and other voices left out of accounts of the past. Yet she does not write of only what has been lost, defying elegy with tributes to her mother while she is alive to read them, and finding vibrancy that remains in sources such as weeds, gravel, insect shells, and the flawed human body. Colorfast weaves its threads into poems that, like the women who dwell in them, are subtly strong enough to stand alone, while they also connect into a provocative conversation about heritage and the holds we can keep.

Desert cottontail // Sylvilagus audubonii - Simmons B. Buntin