Happy summer and happy Pride Month! Love is love is love is love. No matter who you love and no matter where you love.
This month, in honor of love in all its beautiful forms, I’m recommending books for young people that depict and honor the identities of queer rural/Appalachians. I’m really passionate about this topic because I was a rural high school teacher with queer kids. Many of whom didn’t feel comfortable coming out until they graduated and left the community. I always hope that my classroom felt welcoming and safe to them despite the fact that I didn’t know much about literature that represented their lived realities and possibilities for their future, let alone recommend it or teach it.
Now that I know better, I’m trying to do better.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Young Adult Recommendation: Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens
Billie McCaffrey, the tomboy daughter of the town’s preacher, has never quite fit the mold of who everyone says she should be. She doesn’t care for dresses and would rather build furniture than do her makeup. She has a solid group of friends, but things get complicated when she realizes she has feelings for Woods and Janie Lee. Billie doesn’t want anyone labeling or gossiping about her sexuality before she can understand it herself, so she keeps her feelings to herself. She doesn’t want to ruin her friend group dynamic or her dad’s standing in the community she loves. Though she feels like an outsider in her small town, Billie works to find a place for herself in the gray areas of love, identity, and place.
Middle Grade Recommendation: Cattywampus by Ash Van Otterloo
Cattywampus honors the tradition of magic in Appalachia (Love to all the Granny Witches!) and takes it up a notch. In Howler’s Hollow, the use of magic is forbidden. But that only makes Delpha McGill want to use it more. Not a big fan of rules, her hands itch to use the magic she found in her family’s secret book of hexes. More than anything, she wants to be able to help her mama with money troubles. The only thing is that Delpha isn’t too good at keeping secrets and Katybird Hearn, the daughter of a rival witching family, has her own reasons for wanting to learn magic, and she’s not willing to let anything stop her. When an argument accidentally unleashes a hex so bad that it resurrects a whole graveyard full of their ancestors bound and determined to wreak havoc and destruction. To save the Hollow, Delpha and Katy will have to set aside their differences and work together.
Picture Book Recommendation: And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson; Illustrated by Henry Cole
This beautifully illustrated picture book isn’t rural or Appalachian but it teaches young folks about life and diverse family structures through the lives of (real) animals, and I don’t know what could be more rural, so I’ve chosen it for my recommendation. Tango tells the story of two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who create a family together. Inspired by two real male penguins at the Central Park Zoo. During mating season, Roy and Silo paired with one another and seemed depressed until the zookeeper gave them an egg which they helped hatch. And Tango Makes Three has won numerous awards including an ALA Notable Children’s Nominee, the ASPCA Henry Bergh Book Award, and Banks Street Books of the Year.
Bonus Recommendations
I recognize the importance of showing queer identities of young people while they’re young, but I also think it’s important to show that being rural and queer and Appalachian is an identity with a big future. That there is an important place for them in the world, so they need to stay in it, which is why I recommend the following books.
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia
Gay Poems for Red States by Will Edward Taylor Carver, Jr.
Tar Hollow Trans: Essays by Stacy Jane Grover
Hillbilly Queer by J.R. Jamison
Happy reading (and writing)!
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Dr. Parton's Literacy In Place 