For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You’re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people’s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflective essays celebrate the richness of it all: winter floods and summer fires, the roar of a chainsaw and a fiddle in the wilderness, long hikes and open-water swims, an injured bear, a lost wedding ring, and a tree in the middle of a river. Uplake reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.

The story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert, Take This Bread tells the story of a restaurant cook and writer who wandered into a church and found herself transformed, setting up a food pantry around the same altar where she first received the body of Christ.

In the midst of poverty a leader emerges. A school in which people had given up hope. A prayer warrior and woman of faith steps into the position of principal at Eugene Field Elementary. Faced with unimaginable circumstances as the new administrator at Eugene Field, Cindi Hemm steps up to create the impossible, a community school in which children are learning and thriving. An outstanding school of excellence able to stand up to any school in the nation. Eugene Field Elementary a place where hearts are mended, lives are touched, God is present, the hungry are fed, but it is never easy. Live this journey with Cindi that will change your heart and mind about the amazing miracles that can and will happen if you work hard and believe.

"This book examines local food movement activism in a period of increasing climate chaos and neoliberal crisis, economic inequalities and political divisions. In four locales in North Carolina, this book reveals the contributions made by local food movement activists seeking to bring about more sustainable and more socially just local food economies"--