Lunch and Learn: Dr. Anthony Harkins and Dr. Meredith McCarroll on "Appalachian Reckoning"

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights

This spring, grab your favorite lunch at noon and tune in to virtual conversations with the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System on topics from repairing the effects of racial injustice to fighting for equitable access to recovering from exile and loss. Let’s learn together!

Lunch and Learn returns with special guests Dr. Anthony Harkins and Dr. Meredith McCarroll in conversation with the Prince George's County Office of Human Rights and the Prince George's County Memorial Library System discussing their edited volume  "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy."

Registration not required. Click on the YouTube video linked below to stream the program live or watch the recording later.

About the Book:

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities. ~From the Publisher

About the editors:

Dr. Anthony Harkins

Tony Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky and a scholar of U.S. popular culture history, particularly representations of rural America. He is the author of "Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon" (Oxford University Press, 2004) and co-editor, with Meredith McCarroll, of "Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy" (West Virginia University Press, 2019), which expresses the complexities and possibilities of contemporary Appalachia through scholarship, narrative essay, photography and poetry.

Meredith McCarroll

Meredith McCarroll was born and raised in Waynesville, North Carolina. She graduated from Appalachian State University, and later earned a Masters from Simmons College and a PhD from University of Tennessee. She lives now in Portland, Maine where she writes and teaches writing.