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To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers
Appalachia has long been flattened into a white, Christian, and conservative place. While many Appalachians embrace those labels, they fail to acknowledge the presence of communities of color and of queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people across the region. Religious fundamentalism, white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia continue to oppress queer and gender-expansive Appalachians, especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. These realities have adversely affected queer and trans folks' ability to claim their rightful places within the region.
To Belong Here delves into how queer, trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian people make sense of life in the mountains. Featuring contributors whose identities across race, gender, and socioeconomic background make for a uniquely intersectional look at the area, this collection provides a nuanced understanding of Appalachia and what it means to represent it. Themes of erasure, environmentalism, violence, kinship, racism, Indigeneity, queer love, and trans liberation course through the volume and exemplify the writers' resilience in reconciling their complex and often contradictory connections to home.
A collective exploration of rejection and acceptance, To Belong Here calls for a more inclusive future in Appalachia—one where everyone can thrive.
To Belong Here delves into how queer, trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian people make sense of life in the mountains. Featuring contributors whose identities across race, gender, and socioeconomic background make for a uniquely intersectional look at the area, this collection provides a nuanced understanding of Appalachia and what it means to represent it. Themes of erasure, environmentalism, violence, kinship, racism, Indigeneity, queer love, and trans liberation course through the volume and exemplify the writers' resilience in reconciling their complex and often contradictory connections to home.
A collective exploration of rejection and acceptance, To Belong Here calls for a more inclusive future in Appalachia—one where everyone can thrive.
112 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
December 19, 2025
There is much in this small book--poems, essays, coming outs, love of Appalachia and feelings of two spirit queer and trans people.
"For years our elders sat around fires telling those of us in our twenties and thirties about the dignity, hope and courage it took to survive as queer people and we passed along those stories to each other because they are part of our lineage, of how we have loved and how we have made our way in this world that hasn't always and sometimes still doesn't accept us." (Hermelinda Cortes)
"To live openly in West Virginia as queer, as a gay man in a long-term relationship, frightens me." (Lucien Darjeun Meadows)
"I always wonder how the ways in which we are taught to shape God at early ages impact the rest of our lives. The way spiritual traditions become dams, blocking our flow into the abundant life of desires fulfilled." (Joe Tolbert Jr.)
"My queerness, in many instances, has not been nurtured, it has not been held fondly and respectfully by all of my kin in the way it deserves. I have often come back to this truth, wondering how to simultaneously carry the responsibilities I hold to my kin and communities, while the weight of queerphobia pulls so heavily at my neck." (D. Stump)
"Being Two-Spirit, as its meaning sits within my own heart, has always called me to be a bridge, to open myself to the flow of all things that move between, from within and without myself." (D. Stump)
"For years our elders sat around fires telling those of us in our twenties and thirties about the dignity, hope and courage it took to survive as queer people and we passed along those stories to each other because they are part of our lineage, of how we have loved and how we have made our way in this world that hasn't always and sometimes still doesn't accept us." (Hermelinda Cortes)
"To live openly in West Virginia as queer, as a gay man in a long-term relationship, frightens me." (Lucien Darjeun Meadows)
"I always wonder how the ways in which we are taught to shape God at early ages impact the rest of our lives. The way spiritual traditions become dams, blocking our flow into the abundant life of desires fulfilled." (Joe Tolbert Jr.)
"My queerness, in many instances, has not been nurtured, it has not been held fondly and respectfully by all of my kin in the way it deserves. I have often come back to this truth, wondering how to simultaneously carry the responsibilities I hold to my kin and communities, while the weight of queerphobia pulls so heavily at my neck." (D. Stump)
"Being Two-Spirit, as its meaning sits within my own heart, has always called me to be a bridge, to open myself to the flow of all things that move between, from within and without myself." (D. Stump)
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June 12, 2026I’m usually not big on poetry but some of these hit me. I like that it’s an anthology and that the book covers the needs of a light on the eclipsed minority in the Appalachians.
No ratings out of respect of the authors’ experiences.
No ratings out of respect of the authors’ experiences.
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June 21, 2025“This body is but a wave in the ocean of me.”
~ Brandon Sun Eagle Jent from the essay “What You Should Know Before You Kill Me”
At the time I picked this book up, it only had 5 ratings on here and I figured I’d come across a newly released, indie book. The blurb stated that this was an anthology showcasing a collection of stories (essays and poems) from various members of the queer community from rural Appalachia. Wikipedia tells me that ‘Appalachia’ refers to the “geographic region located in the central and southern sections of the Appalachian Mountains in the east of North America.”
The book consists of poems and essays from 12 varied members of the queer community in Appalachia (there are 19 contributions in total). The editor, Rae Garringer, had mentioned that they wanted to highlight different viewpoints so they specifically chose people who didn’t consider themselves to be writers and creators and instead chose LGBTQ+ community organizers that had a story to tell, to mine their creativity, and asked them to contribute to this project.
What I didn’t expect to find and what ultimately blew me away about these stories is how most of them really talk about the love they have for the land - this is, in a nutshell, an open and honest love letter to Appalachia. The stories go into detail about what it means to call a place “home”, to dissect the feelings associated with that word and the conflicting feelings of loving a place that may not always love you back. The Appalachian region is notoriously stereotyped as rural, conservative, white supremacist and unwelcoming to members of the LGBTQ+ community in the US. These stories are a front row seat to the people that have not only survived in this region but have navigated through their hardships and managed to thrive despite it all.
The standout essay for me that explored this exact theme was ‘Where Are You From?’ by Lucien Darjeun Meadows. This one beautifully explores the dilemma of belonging to a single place all your life and the alienation one might feel from a place they call “home” when they feel that that place will never accept them as they are. Another essay that I thought was equally powerful was by the editor, Rae Garringer, called ‘Proximity’. This talks about homesickness, belonging, suppression or erasure of queer history leading to rewriting or even inventing queer stories for yourself in the process.
There are stories that talk about belonging from various intersections of identity - race, class, gender, and sexuality. These stories examine some important themes - joy, grief, survival, guilt, resistance and the power of creating community. This was an eye opening read because there were things I learnt reading these stories that I didn’t know about before.
Overall, this was a viscerally honest look into the ground reality of rural Appalachia through the lens of the LGBTQ+ community. The contributors bared their soul in these pages and the writing reflects their vulnerability. It’s beautiful how these stories have been able to embody both grief and hope. I cannot recommend this book enough.
As always with the case of memoirs and books with autobiographical elements, I will not be rating this out of respect for the contributors’ personal experiences that they’ve been kind enough to share.
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June 16, 2026What a heavy book in less than 150 pages.
To be honest, I picked this up on a whim.
Being as detached from the USA as I am (as a person from a 3rd world Asian country), I have a very basic grasp of Native American history so a lot of the things that the writers have talked about here are unfamiliar and new to me. But what wasn't new was that feeling of trying to find a community, a home, a place to be loved that echoes through every piece of this slim collection. It was a genuinely bittersweet experience, reading this and I'm so glad I did.
To be honest, I picked this up on a whim.
Being as detached from the USA as I am (as a person from a 3rd world Asian country), I have a very basic grasp of Native American history so a lot of the things that the writers have talked about here are unfamiliar and new to me. But what wasn't new was that feeling of trying to find a community, a home, a place to be loved that echoes through every piece of this slim collection. It was a genuinely bittersweet experience, reading this and I'm so glad I did.
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July 2, 2025this book combines two of my interests: appalachian life and the lived experiences of minority groups. many of the contributions moved me, and i admire the raw vulnerability of the authors, as well as rae garringer’s important work and social justice activism.
no rating out of respect for the author’s experiences.
no rating out of respect for the author’s experiences.
June 2, 2026
I liked a lot of this; however, the pieces did start to seem repetitive and bleed into each other, both in terms of subjects and style. Perhaps if the essays/prose portions were longer, they could've gone deeper into their stories and become more differentiated. I think my favorite parts overall were the poems by Brandon Sun Eagle Jent.
June 4, 2026
Much love to those suffering. Happy pride month, y'all.
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June 28, 2026Ciężko mi ocenić tę książkę, bo to odczucia bohaterów, ale wiem na pewno, że jest to głos potrzebny i z którym w niektórych aspektach bardzo się utożsamiałam 🥰
July 7, 2025
I loved this book. Yes, it's heavy but it was good to sit with it.
I grew up in WV. I moved when I was in highschool and answering "Where are you from?" because of my (at the time) obvious accent, did come with side effects. People, students AND teachers, automatically made judgements about my political stances (I didn't have any at the time), economic standing, how I must be closed minded and hardly educated. They would joke about dating cousins and about the fact that I was wearing braces (implying that now I was out of WV, I could get dental care). I found out quickly it was better to just say "Charleston" even though I was only born at the hospital there and then not correct them when they followed up with "Ah, South Carolina" because then they had nothing else to say about it. Even though it felt like a betrayal to my roots, it was just easier and we could move on faster. ...And this is coming from cis white woman.
Growing up in WV, you learned gender roles pretty quickly. Boys are rough and tumble, girls are not. If you were of the "rough and tumble" persuasion (because your only friends were neighbors you could walk to) you were just a tom-boy, but you better not talk like the boys, or fart, or spit, or carry on like the boys because that was not "lady like" and you'd get scolded. It took moving halfway across the continent and going to a school four times the size of the one I was going to in WV in order for me to be in class with someone who wasn't white.
Looking back on it, growing up in West Virginia was absolutely bizarre. My brother moved back. I did not. However, I love visiting. There is nowhere on this planet that can capture the same feeling you get from sitting on the warm bare rock face jutting out at the top of the mountain at my parents' farm after hiking through the brambles and understory just to get up there and sit and listen to how loud silence can be; The trees in the wind, the chipmunks and that deer that didn't see you first stirring up the leaves....
This book captured that feeling of being half ashamed of being from the place that all the stereotypes are based on but loving the place nonetheless. Then it captured so much more from people who have so much more warring inside them than I will ever.
Excellent read. Will be buying a copy.
I grew up in WV. I moved when I was in highschool and answering "Where are you from?" because of my (at the time) obvious accent, did come with side effects. People, students AND teachers, automatically made judgements about my political stances (I didn't have any at the time), economic standing, how I must be closed minded and hardly educated. They would joke about dating cousins and about the fact that I was wearing braces (implying that now I was out of WV, I could get dental care). I found out quickly it was better to just say "Charleston" even though I was only born at the hospital there and then not correct them when they followed up with "Ah, South Carolina" because then they had nothing else to say about it. Even though it felt like a betrayal to my roots, it was just easier and we could move on faster. ...And this is coming from cis white woman.
Growing up in WV, you learned gender roles pretty quickly. Boys are rough and tumble, girls are not. If you were of the "rough and tumble" persuasion (because your only friends were neighbors you could walk to) you were just a tom-boy, but you better not talk like the boys, or fart, or spit, or carry on like the boys because that was not "lady like" and you'd get scolded. It took moving halfway across the continent and going to a school four times the size of the one I was going to in WV in order for me to be in class with someone who wasn't white.
Looking back on it, growing up in West Virginia was absolutely bizarre. My brother moved back. I did not. However, I love visiting. There is nowhere on this planet that can capture the same feeling you get from sitting on the warm bare rock face jutting out at the top of the mountain at my parents' farm after hiking through the brambles and understory just to get up there and sit and listen to how loud silence can be; The trees in the wind, the chipmunks and that deer that didn't see you first stirring up the leaves....
This book captured that feeling of being half ashamed of being from the place that all the stereotypes are based on but loving the place nonetheless. Then it captured so much more from people who have so much more warring inside them than I will ever.
Excellent read. Will be buying a copy.
June 30, 2025
I found this book difficult to read but not for any other reason than it was heavy. Some of the stories are sad and heartbreaking but give a decent view of the complexities of life in Appalachia for anyone the title ascribes to. While I cannot relate to a vast majority of this book, I do feel as though each author gives a deliberate and eloquent view of their lives. Each perspective is unique but also sadly similar. They each seem to have a draw for their hometown but a need for belonging there that they can’t obtain due to the conservative nature of Appalachia. It’s a short and quick read but it took me some time to finish because I wanted to sit with each story and poem to truly absorb it.
June 13, 2026
I'm glad I read this. It is exactly what it says it is, but I was still pleasantly surprised. I expected something harsher and more raw. But these poems and essays were thought and at times wistful. They all portray a feeling of conflict between Home and the Other People Who Make Home Complicated.
Parts were absolutely lovely. Some pieces didn't resonate to me. Some seemed like they could have been from any time in the American Literary Tradition, and others seemed so current that it was as if they were still being finished as I read them.
I'm glad this book exists. I wish it didn't have to, I think. This is the type of book that exists because it *needs* to, and is published in a way that had to shirk the trappings of mainstream. But authors and stories like this shouldn't have to shirk. They should be as accessible as anything. Someday, we'll get there.
Parts were absolutely lovely. Some pieces didn't resonate to me. Some seemed like they could have been from any time in the American Literary Tradition, and others seemed so current that it was as if they were still being finished as I read them.
I'm glad this book exists. I wish it didn't have to, I think. This is the type of book that exists because it *needs* to, and is published in a way that had to shirk the trappings of mainstream. But authors and stories like this shouldn't have to shirk. They should be as accessible as anything. Someday, we'll get there.
May 31, 2026
This was a great read! I appreciate how diverse the contributors are and how they spoke to a wide range of experiences in Appalachia. I will definitely be checking out more work by these writers, as well as more collections like this.
A lot of the content in these writings was heavy, as being ‘other’ in Appalachia is often difficult and leads to a complex relationship with the region and one’s home. As a queer Appalachian myself, some of these writings hit like sucker punches. But there was also so much beauty and love in these words that really resonated.
A lot of the content in these writings was heavy, as being ‘other’ in Appalachia is often difficult and leads to a complex relationship with the region and one’s home. As a queer Appalachian myself, some of these writings hit like sucker punches. But there was also so much beauty and love in these words that really resonated.
June 20, 2025
Strong poetry, essays, other writing from a group one does not readily associate with Appalachia. You can feel the love that these creators have for this region of the country. You can feel the courage that each individual radiates in the truth of their self identification. Claiming their heritage, they show us the true spirit of Appalachia. May that spirit grow and flourish across all regions of the world.
June 19, 2025
A kiss in a shadow, laced with fear.
They whispered love where none could hear.
Even in the dark, one thing was clear.
That the universe had made them queer.
I thought all the stories were going to be by Two-Spirit Appalachian writers but I guess I read the title wrong. It was still a cute little assortment of stories/poems from Appalachian people.
They whispered love where none could hear.
Even in the dark, one thing was clear.
That the universe had made them queer.
I thought all the stories were going to be by Two-Spirit Appalachian writers but I guess I read the title wrong. It was still a cute little assortment of stories/poems from Appalachian people.
June 22, 2025
**Rounded up from 3.5**
Very interesting and surprisingly relatable read, especially growing up on the edge of Appalachia. My favorite pieces were the last two in the book. The essays were a little slower to read, but nonetheless thought-provoking, especially given the current political climate.
Very interesting and surprisingly relatable read, especially growing up on the edge of Appalachia. My favorite pieces were the last two in the book. The essays were a little slower to read, but nonetheless thought-provoking, especially given the current political climate.
June 26, 2025
In the same vein of "Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean", this collection of essays and poems instills so much rage, heartache, and so so so much love. Each one of these pieces impacted my soul, regardless if I could relate to them or not. Love these mountains. Love your people.
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May 29, 2026Books like this are so important to challenge the narrative that coastal left-leaning folks have about Appalachia and the South. Real stories from 2SLGBTQIA+ folks describing their complicated love for this region of the country. Highly recommend!
April 24, 2025
Balm to my heart <3
June 11, 2025
Que libro tan duro y necesario “for bubbies who are sissies and sissies who are bubbies, for those who defy definition” 🥲
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June 13, 2025very interesting collection!
June 15, 2025
3.5 stars
June 1, 2026
A vivid telling of life in a predominately White Racist area
June 13, 2026
This collection of essays and poems truly moved me with its vulnerability and insight into the lives and personal struggles of its authors. It was a beautiful, raw, and evocative book.
June 17, 2026
This book is about reclaiming belonging. A really thoughtful book.
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June 20, 2026Goodreads reading challenge Pride picks regarding living in Appalachia and being Queer.
June 22, 2026
Read for a GoodReads challenge.
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June 25, 2026Powerful Narrative
A powerful narrative blending the LGBT community with the Appalachian culture. It is a strange and harmonious mixture of divergent mindsets.
A powerful narrative blending the LGBT community with the Appalachian culture. It is a strange and harmonious mixture of divergent mindsets.
June 29, 2026
A nice little mixed collection.
July 1, 2026
Este livro junta um conjunto de histórias que representam lugares comuns para quem enfrenta discriminação por não encaixas nas expetativas das maiorias. Aborda diversas formas de discriminação mas foca-se em particular nas questões queer.
June 27, 2026
Recommend read but I found some of the longer stories did not keep my attention. The poems though amazing.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews