The Grit Behind the Miracle: A Community Builds a Hospital
by Alice E. Sink

Overcoming their own fears, the people of Hickory, N.C., come together during wartime to care for children stricken with polio.

Read an excerpt.

Everyone’s an Expert
by Jane Harris Woodside

Appalachians in Madison County, N.C., show how neighbors can help neighbors tackle public health problems—from getting the word out about flu shots to lending wigs to cancer patients.

East Tennessee State University works with Northeast Tennessee communities to revolutionize how we educate future generations of health care professionals.

Physicians can bring their expertise to remote rural areas without ever leaving home.

Appalachian mothers might well hold the key to preventing and eliminating tobacco use.

Separated from home and family, a young West Virginia boy negotiates the eerie world of a polio sanitarium.

A public health nurse finds hope and hardship in the hills of West Virginia during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Asking the impossible can make living with a chronic disease like juvenile diabetes even more taxing than it is already.

Read an excerpt.

Rattlesnakes by Romulus Linney

“The Shooks and Ab Mullins carried Malcolm into the yard. Sassy Plankman yelled for her husband, Griswold. They laid Sassy and Griswold's son down on a quilt on the porch. ‘Keep him on his stomach,’ said Spencer Shook. ‘On his back, the poison moves faster....’”

This is the Life
by Geoff Fuller

“‘A life of charm and dissonance,’ the man says, raising his shot glass in exaggerated salute. He's three empty stools down the bar, and there's no one on the dozen stools to his right, clear to Gabbie's broad front window. The blind is drawn, and summer light pours in through the slats. I can't really see him, just a silhouette in work boots and a flannel shirt with a backdrop of people passing on the bright sidewalk outside. My right foot tingles as if asleep...”

After the Wreck by Donna Doyle

Tonic by John Cantey Knight

To an Old Friend by Jim Britt

1953 by Ron Rash

A Crowd of Quiet by Glenn McKee

Alzheimer's by Connie Green

Lessons in Hunger by Keith Flynn

Afterlives by Michael McFee

Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes by Lisa Roney, reviewed by Jane Harris Woodside

Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse by Kate Cumming, edited by Richard Barksdale Harwell, reviewed by Elaine Fehringer Leone

Midwifery and Childbirth in America by Judith Pence Rooks, reviewed by Molly Meighan

The Chinese Poet Awakens by Jeff Daniel Marion, reviewed by Fred Chappell

Photo credits (from the top): Bett Hudson Eatman; Madison County Health Consortium; Larry Smith, ETSU University Relations; UT Telemedicine Network; Gerald Gentry; courtesy of William E. Wallace; courtesy of Wilma Lewis; courtesy of Jeff Powers-Beck; David Simon; Bart Galloway; Ted Cooley; courtesy of Michael McFee; Stephen Marion. None of these images may be reproduced without permission.

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