Summer Reading List

Books by UNC Asheville faculty and staff

By UNC Asheville

July 21^st, 2023

Whether you’re looking to escape into a good story or continue a journey of life-long learning, there are plenty of wonderful books just waiting to be cracked. And many of the year’s great reads come from the UNC Asheville community. Here is a roundup of books authored by faculty and staff members of the university.

Secret Ingredients

When Erica Abrams Locklear teaches her Literature, Food, and Photography in Appalachia class, she leads a discussion on the idea of Appalachia as a distinct region. That concept grew in the American imagination around the time of Reconstruction, she noted, but it came with dangerous stereotypes. White people were often depicted as coarse, while Black and Indigenous people were left out of the story altogether.

Popular travel literature also equated poorly prepared food with poor people. But when Locklear, a professor of English and the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities at UNC Asheville, was given a cookbook assembled by her grandmother, she was in for a surprise. The recipes included dishes not typically associated with Appalachia, such as devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. “Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder,” according to the description of “Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People,” Locklear's new book about how representations of food have shaped national perceptions of Appalachian people.

Digging into special collections archives at UNC Asheville, Berea College, North Carolina State University, and other universities, Locklear found many exceptions to the idea that Appalachian people were subsisting on a limited and undesirable diet. “It was helpful to look at not only personal diaries and cookbooks but also at hotel menus,” she says. The Asheville area has long been a tourist destination for wealthy city dwellers with cosmopolitan tastes, and there were almost certainly mountain people preparing and serving those dishes in hotels and spas.

Recently, there’s been a renewed interest in Appalachian foodways. Locklear points out that the April issue of Bon Appetit magazine featured a 16-page spread on that subject. Still, she’s cautious: “On one hand I’m thrilled that food so long denigrated is now being celebrated,” she says. “But I think we need to be careful about what counts as ‘heritage’ food. Likewise, promoting that food at high-end restaurants can be exclusionary” to those who can’t afford to eat there.

But her biggest concern is that “While the food [of Appalachia] is being lifted up, the same is not true for national perceptions of mountain people.”

Emotional Weather

“Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep” follows the experiences of “a queer Jewish New Yorker living in the South, looking for love in the internet age,” according to the collection’s description. It was written by UNC Asheville Professor of English Lori Horvitz.

Horvitz writes with humor, curiosity, and self-awareness. We the readers benefit from her misadventures, which she shares with wit and candor. The narrator of these essays leaves us both wincing and rooting for her.

In a starred review, Kirkus wrote, “Her prose is always precise, concrete, and evocative, whether she’s hymning the thrill of love with a younger woman—‘it felt like porn when she flipped her leg onto mine, and we shared an apple cider froufrou drink’—or elegizing its wistful end: ‘She put her car in drive, waved one last time, and stepped back into her life, and I into mine, a chorus of leaf blowers blasting in the distance.’ The result is a consistently beguiling read. A scintillating collection, full of subtle wit and passionate yearning."

“Four Months Past Florence” by Emily Wilson, centers on Millie Willard, a high school junior from a small, coastal town in South Carolina, who dreams of becoming a serious journalist. In real life, Millie is the weatherwoman for her school’s newspaper, The Bloom. Meanwhile, Hurricane Florence is brewing off the coast and everything is about to change.

Emily Wilson, the director of annual giving at UNC Asheville, penned her quirky and engaging YA novel in verse. Here’s an example:

Felicia Fitz is a paved interstate in a town of red dirt roads.

She’s a quick-footed fox in a field of run-down hunting dogs.

She didn’t come to play,

and the whole town listens

to what she has to say.

“Ammi-Joan Paquette, an agent with the Erin Murphy Literary Agency, reached out to me via Twitter and asked if I had ever considered writing a novel-in-verse,” Wilson reveals. “As someone who had only written poetry up until that point, I hadn't considered novels-in-verse for any of my own projects.”

The story itself is inspired by Wilson’s own experience of evacuating from Wilmington, North Carolina, to escape from Hurricane Florence in 2018. “One of those people who had to stay was our friend Michelle. Michelle was a part-time public librarian, which technically made her a state employee who was mandated to work at one of the local shelters,” she explains. “Michelle told us details about her stay—how cramped and smelly the shelter had become, how mismanaged the entire thing felt. When she mentioned that the local newspaper had started an investigation, the entirety of the plot of ‘Four Months Past Florence’ came to me.”

Wilson hopes that, while reading “Four Months Past Florence,” “young readers in particular also take away a sense of wanting to continue to improve the communities around them while also appreciating it's okay to admit you often won't know everything you need to when you start out and it's okay to acknowledge and apologize for mistakes you might make along the way.”

Independent Studies

If you’d like to bone up on your European history, the second edition of “The French Revolution: A Document Collection” by Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo was published at the beginning of this year. Rizzo, professor of history and interim dean of humanities at UNC Asheville, says the first edition of the text, in 1999, came about because there were no other books that served the needs of her classes and students. As Toni Morrison famously said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

The documents used to illustrate the French Revolution originally came from “facsimiles held in U.S. libraries, especially the New York Public Library [and] some were copies we made in France,” Rizzo explains. “Now so much is digitized, including the French National Archives, that we could do everything from here.” For the second edition, Rizzo and Mason added more sources by under-represented groups, such as Haitians, women, and rural and conservative people.

So, why tell the story of the French Revolution through documents rather than narrative? “All readers, but especially college history students, need to encounter the past on its own terms with as little interference/direction as possible,” Rizzo explains.

Returning to issues facing present-day Americans, “Fallow Lands of Plenty: Public Schools as Leaders in Rural Food System Relocalization” by Eric Klein “chronicles one high school’s attempt to feed itself,” according to the book description. The experiment “unravels the fabric of neoliberal education, exposes its logics of dependence and control, and begins to weave a new tapestry of education for community cooperation and resilience.”

Klein is UNC Asheville’s associate director of outreach and success. The premise for this book reaches well beyond school lunch. “Set during the ongoing transition between post-industrial globalization and the community structures that are to come, this rich narrative moves from furrows of Appalachian red clay soil to the mountaintop homesteads of elder seed savers, to the conveyor belts of sterilized food sorting machines, and, finally, to a school’s cafeteria on the day that 250 portions of student-grown sweet potatoes were serves,” explains publisher IAP.

While not exactly a beach read (though perhaps it’s time to redefine “beach read?), “Fallow Lands” has been hailed as “a stirring manifesto for transforming public schools into centers of learning about community resilience” and “a must-read for today and tomorrow’s generations.”

Trigger warning for those with a fear of snakes; glimmer (the opposite of a trigger) alert for those fascinated by reptiles: “Boas of the West Indies,” by leading herpetologists R. Graham Reynolds, Robert W. Henderson, Luis M. Díaz, Tomás Michel Rodríguez, and Alberto R. Puente-Rolón, is available from Cornell University Press.

Graham Reynolds, an associate professor of biology at UNC Asheville and director of the University Honors Program is also the co-editor of the books “The Amphibians of Tennessee” and “The Reptiles of Tennessee,” and the co-discoverer of the Silver Boa, a new species of boid snake from a remote corner of the Bahamian Archipelago.

“‘Boas of the West Indies’ examines the eighteen species extant on these islands along with several others now extinct,” reports the book's description. “This volume synthesizes established knowledge and new findings on the evolutionary biology, natural history, and conservation statuses of these iconic snakes.” And for those who are visual learners, the tome includes more than one hundred color photos and range maps. It’s been heralded as “unparalleled in its significance for the study of West Indian herpetofauna.”