Urban Arts Space’s Community Artist-in-Residence, Tyiesha Radford Shorts, shares five of her essential reads connected to her expertise in Black Appalachian studies. From academic essays and memoir to novels and poetry, these recommendations span genres, time periods, and perspectives to provide a nuanced view of this underappreciated community.

1. Bone Black by bell hooks – In her autobiographical work, bell hooks evinces Black cultural transmission in the Appalachian region through her own Kentucky childhood remembrances. Her rejection of literary convention makes the work itself an embodied practice of casting off traditional narratives of Blackness and embracing the author’s representation of race and place through her lived experience. The text invites audiences to consider how do you know what you know?—about race, about place, about self—and to reconsider what you thought you knew about Appalachia. 

2. Blacks in Appalachia ed. by Willam H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell – A rare anthological collection, this text is one of few comprehensive works chronicling the lives of Black people in Appalachia. William H. Turner notes in his 1985 introduction that, while there was a surge in interest of Black studies and Appalachian studies, very rarely did the two interests overlap. This text serves to remedy singular lines of research while introducing new audiences to existing scholarship.  

3. Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia by Karida Brown – A fellow granddaughter of a coal miner, Karida Brown offers a rare approach to understanding Appalachian ancestry. Although raised in Detroit, Michigan, her generational connection to the coal mines of Kentucky offer a unique point of entry into Black Appalachian experiences. Brown also captures the voices of those who were reared in the mountains and valleys of Appalachia through direct ethnographic research and oral histories.

4. Affrilachia: Poems by Frank X. Walker – “kin tucky / beautiful & ugly / cousin / i too am of these hills / my folks / have corn rowed / tobacco / laid track / strip mined / worshipped & whiskeyed / from Harlan to Maysville,” writes Poet Frank X. Walker. A co-founder of the Affrilachian poets, Walker creates imagery of a land of displacement and shared trial while mapping his own triumphs for readers. What began as a personal story became a movement and united Black poets across Appalachia and beyond.

5. Beloved by Toni Morrison – Sometimes we forget the materiality of the world Toni Morrison created in the novel Beloved. Inspired by true events of Margaret Garner and her family’s escape from slavery in Kentucky to pseudo-freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio, both regions represent the duplicity of Black Appalachian life and offer context for how people lived their lives on either side of a national conflict.
 

Read more about Tyiesha's work and programs on her residency page.