This Issue

Nikki Giovanni is one of America’s best-known and most-revered poets, a person who has garnered great enthusiasm for poetry among not only its aficionados but by many who previously thought that they could never enjoy poems. We feel blessed to have her as the featured author for this issue of Appalachian Heritage. How fortunate we also feel to have commentary on Giovanni’s life and work from her biographer, Dr. Virginia Fowler, and from two of America’s outstanding black female scholars—Dr. Trudier Harris and Dr. Joanne Veal Gabbin.

We could think of no better way to complement the material in this issue on Nikki Giovanni than the conversation we include here with bell hooks, who like Giovanni, is one of America’s most prominent contemporary black female intellectuals and social commentators.

The featured photographer for this issue, Michael Kiernan, is not only Photography Manager for Virginia Tech, but also well-known for his free-lance work.

We are proud to include a story by Ron Rash in this issue. He is one of Nikki Giovanni’s favorite writers, and was the very first featured author of this magazine ten years ago in 2002. We have an essay by Kate Black, the Appalachian Archivist for the University of Kentucky, on a mountain gardener. We also include a book review by Silas House of The Evening Hour by Carter Sickles.

We have gathered an outstanding line-up of distinguished poets here as well. When we first started planning out this issue well over a year ago, long before Nikky Finney won the National Book Award, Nikki Giovanni insisted that she would like to have a poem from Nikky Finney included. David Huddle was raised in Ivanhoe, Virginia; Jesse Graves in Sharp’s Chapel, Tennessee, Elizabeth Cox in Chattanooga, and Jane Sasser in Fairview, North Carolina. R. T. Smith lives in Lexington, Virginia, where he serves as the editor of Shenandoah, and Maurice Manning, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry last year, lives on a farm in Washington County, Kentucky, and has just accepted a position as a professor at Transylvania University.