Elizabeth Catte and Neema Avashia will join us via Zoom for a hybrid event to discuss their recent work, which challenges and enriches our national conversation about Appalachia.

Join us in person or on Zoom!

Pfau Library, PL-4005, FCE, and on Zoom at https://csusb.zoom.us/j/388207496

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Her recent book, "Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in A Mountain Place" (2022) was a 2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist (Lesbian Memoir/Biography), named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot, also was a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022, and was a Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction. “This book lives beautifully in the gray area of trying to navigate a divisive environment while growing up queer and Asian American.” (Forbes) Find the book at the publishers website here, and as an audiobook from Libro.fm here.

Elizabeth Catte lives in Virginia and has written two books, "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia" (2018) and "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia" (2021). "Pure America" made the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards longlist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and was named named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021. Her essays and commentary have appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Nation, on NPR, and more. She runs Passel, an applied history  consulting firm, with her partner Josh, using history to solve real-world problems in Appalachia and the Mid-Atlantic. Catte holds a PhD in public history and is a member of the National Writers Union, the Authors Guild, and a board member of the Appalachian African-American Cultural Center in Pennington Gap, Virginia. Laura Adamczyk, for the A.V. Club, wrote of Catte's "What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia"  that it is "a more focused version of Howard Zinn’s venerable A People’s History Of The United States, turning its lens to the on-the-ground civic struggles of people who have lived and died in Appalachia.”

This event is made possible by the President's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Board, the Pfau Library, the Faculty Center for Excellence, and the History Department.

Please send any question to Jeremy Murray, jmurray@csusb.edu, History Department.