Rising from the Ashes – Urban Appalachians in Greater Cincinnati, 2015

The music of community, connection and advocacy for urban Appalachians continues to resound through the hills of Greater Cincinnati in the wake of the recent demise of Cincinnati’s Urban Appalachian Council. This roundtable will use the Story Circle format to share the Cincinnati Appalachian movement‘s continuing evolution and involve participants in sharing experiences of connecting Appalachians in urban settings in ways that honor and nurture their sense of identity and culture. The Urban Appalachian Council in Cincinnati served as a focal point for community, Appalachian identity and cultural celebration, and much more, from the early 1970’s until it was no longer able to sustain itself and the organization dissolved in early 2014. Unwilling to let go of the invaluable role that UAC had played in the lives of so many, a small group of UAC founders, former staff, and loyal friends used their skill at community organizing to convene a group of Stewards to rebuild the connective tissue that was lost with UAC’s passing. The Stewards serve as conveners, inviting others to join in strengthening community connection, support, and self-care. We are breathing new life into the traditional UAC missions of cultural celebration, advocacy, and research, and we are establishing connections to, and advocating for, critical services needed by our Appalachian families and communities. In this session we will share the mosaic of stories that comprise this nurturing movement in Cincinnati, and we will invite others to share their stories so we can learn from and support each other

Session Introduction and Discussion Leader

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Appalachian Arts in the Queen City

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A Reading from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Volume 19: Appalachia Under Thirty

A project of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel has given voice to a wide range of Appalachian writers since the mid-1980s. An annual themed literary journal focusing on writers from the Appalachian Mountains, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel has no institutional support, but rather is a grassroots effort of writers, editors and activists from the region. In honor of our thirty-some years of publication, the theme for our current issue is Appalachia Under Thirty. We invited writers under thirty to talk about their lives and issues. And, not to exclude older writers, we invited those over thirty to reflect on their own under-thirty experiences, or their current observation of youth culture in Appalachian communities. We received a wealth of material from each. These poems, stories, essays, and memoirs are, by turns, angry, pensive, joyful— reflective, we think, of the exciting work being done in this second generation of the Appalachian literary renaissance. We hope Appalachian Studies Association Conference participants will this lively and enlivening reading and conversation about this current issue of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, a literary journal with grit