1 of 20
Talia Freeman
Beech Mountain Resort, North Carolina
2 of 20
Theresa Burriss
Radford University professor, director of RU's Appalachian Regional Studies Center
3 of 20
Savanna Lyons
Program Director, West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition; West Virginia
4 of 20
Erika Johnson
Floyd, Virginia
5 of 20
Jonathan Romeo
Program Manager, The Crooked Road: Virginia's Heritage Music Trail; Virginia
6 of 20
Erik Reece
Senior Lecturer, University of Kentucky; author, journalist; Kentucky
7 of 20
Kirk Hazen
Director, West Virginia Dialect Project, English Professor, West Virginia University
8 of 20
Damien and Betsy Heath
Owners, Lot 12 Public House; West Virginia
9 of 20
Michael Clark
Elaina Arnez-Smith
Owner, New River Mountain Guides, Access Fund Athelete Ambassador; West Virginia
10 of 20
Warner Photography
Leah Wong Ashburn
Highland Brewing Company; North Carolina
11 of 20
Dreama Gentry
Executive Director, Externally Sponsored Programs, Berea College; Kentucky
12 of 20
Kathlina Alford
Research Associate; Tennessee
13 of 20
Brett Winterlemon
Ed Walker
Social entrepreneur, developer, lawyer, founder of City Works; Virginia
14 of 20
Dr. Anna George
Director, Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute
15 of 20
Tom Riford
President and CEO, Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau; Maryland
16 of 20
Gwynne Rukenbrod
Executive Director, HandMade in America; North Carolina
17 of 20
C. Williams
Silas House
NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies, Berea College; novelist, playwright, editor; Kentucky
18 of 20
Kris Hodges
Floyd, Virginia
19 of 20
Al Garnto
Artist, Blairsville, Georgia
20 of 20
Thomas Watson
Executive Director, Rural Support Partners; North Carolina
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Writers, musicians, activists, researchers, educators, visionaries… here are 25 Generation X and Y people who are making a difference in our region. This is by no means an exhaustive list – who would you add to it? Email us!
Silas House
NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies, Berea College; novelist, playwright, editor; Kentucky
“I knew for sure I wanted to be a writer when I was in seventh grade. A great teacher of mine, Sandra Stidham, gave me a copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and I was so moved and changed by that book that as soon as I closed the cover, I thought, ‘I want to try to do this. I want to move people this way, and change the way they think about things by telling them a story.’”
Silas House has done that, from the publication of his first novel, "Clay’s Quilt," in 2001, a New York Times bestseller. That and the books that followed (including “A Parchment of Leaves” and “The Coal Tattoo”) received major literary awards. Studs Terkel wrote his last blurb praising “Something’s Rising,” a collection of writings about mountaintop removal mining House published with Jason Howard; other books include "Same Sun Here" and "Eli the Good."
“This land is a part of me and I find it incredibly sad to think about leaving here… After one second of feeling like I ought to leave, my Appalachian pride kicks in and I think, ‘No, I’m going to stay here and fight. I’m going to do what I can to make this a better place.’
“And the main thing, of course, is that the good outweighs the bad. Whenever I am away from Appalachia, I feel discombobulated. I love walking into a store where a cashier will say, ‘Hidy, honey, how are ye?’ That’s home to me, and I can’t bear the thoughts of leaving it.”
Jonathan Romeo
Program Manager, The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail; Virginia
“I came to southwest Virginia as a classical guitarist and composer, and once here, quickly became immersed in the traditional music of the region,” says Romeo, who grew up in Richmond, Va. and came to Mountain Empire Community College as an artist-in-residence in 1990. “I fell in love with it.”
He returned to Richmond, then came back for another artist-in-residence position in Clifton Forge, Va., then back to Richmond, then to New York (along the way, composing music for symphony and ballet and working in film). His third artist-in-residence position brought him to Richlands, Va. Three days before was was to leave, 9/11 occurred.
He left New York that Friday, moved to Tazewell County and stayed.
In 2008 he became interim executive director of The Crooked Road, and program manager in 2012, and his focus is on TCR’s Traditional Music Education Program.
“I love working with youth musicians and educators, and this work really touches people – it makes them feel proud of their heritage, and the place in which they live.”
Erik Reece
Senior Lecturer, University of Kentucky; author, journalist; Kentucky
Erik Reece grew up in Kentucky. A high school teacher inspired him to go into journalism. After five years in Scottsville, Va., he came back to teach and write and live – “I wanted to be a place-based writer,” he says. The place – Kentucky – became his subject. He’s written for Harper’s, Orion and The New York Times. A story for Harper's became a book, “Lost Mountain,” which won awards from Columbia University and the Sierra Club. He’s also written “An American Gospel: On Family, History and the Kingdom of God.” Much of his writing is focused on Appalachia.
“I have this fundamental sense that the creation and the creator are of one piece,” says Reece. “There’s an incredible environmental ethic in that kind of thinking.” Though, he admits, “you don’t know when you’re going to alienate someone” by talking about it.
Reece teaches writing at the University of Kentucky, a challenge in a time where students’ views of education and language are so rapidly changing. “If you can really engage the students in something of substance, then they realize they have something at stake.”
Al Garnto
Artist, Blairsville, Georgia
Al Garnto sees art where others don’t. Besides painting and charcoal work, Garnto is a sculptor who recycles materials he finds in sawmills, welding shops, dumpsters and old barns. His current project is the Appalachian Sculpture Project, which, when finished, will scatter “24 kinetic sculptures from Georgia to Maine.”
It wasn’t an easy path: Garnto has a rare form of dyslexia that wasn’t diagnosed until he was in his 20s – after he was expelled from school at age 15, he finished his GED and enrolled in college but still struggled with academics. An art professor at Young Harris College realized the problem was a learning disorder.
He went on to study at the Atlanta College of Art; he returned to Blairsville to open his fine arts studio in 1994, and has stayed ever since.
“The Appalachian mountains are my home and some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet,” says Garnto, “and the Appalachian mountain people are some of the strongest, kindest, most respectful people I have ever known.”
Erika Johnson and Kris Hodges
Floyd, Virginia
Erika Johnson and Kris Hodges are the brains behind FloydFest, one of the best-loved festivals in the region, celebrating its 12th year in 2013 (“Rise and Shine” is this year’s festival theme). Johnson describes herself as a “Floyd County semi-native” – her family moved to the county when she was five, during the back-to-the-land movement. Some years later, she and Hodges met in a restaurant in downtown Roanoke – a musician, Hodges had come there by way of Atlanta and Raleigh. They started a restaurant in Floyd, Oddfellas, where they hosted musicians including Rhonda Vincent, Mike Seeger and Stacey Earle.
“Oddfellas was definitely kind of the germination of the festival idea,” says Johnson. “Floyd was ripe for someone to harness the creative energy of the music there and the art and the unique community and at the time.”
They sold the restaurant and started the festival with a business plan and some good contacts. The early years were difficult, but the festival has flowered.
Tom Riford
President and CEO, Hagerstown-Washington County Convention and Visitors Bureau; Maryland
Tom Riford has been a vocal advocate for Hagerstown and Washington County in a range of roles – first in his work for Whitetail Ski Resort, then as a broadcast news anchor (he still works for WJEJ two or three days a week, doing news and weather at 5, 6 and 7 a.m., weather at 7:30, sports at 7:50 and news at 8.) “I sleep some,” he concedes, “but I think, give a busy person something to do and they’ll get it done.”
Giving back to the community is at the core of his busy-ness – besides his work in tourism, promoting the region he loves, he is deeply involved in arts and health care-related organizations, fundraising, emceeing. “Sometimes I do 27 days in a row without a break because I’m doing so much volunteering,” he says, but “we’re in this mortal coil for such a short time.”
He’s as inspired by history as he is by the present-day – he’ll spin moving stories from the Civil War and the early days of Hagerstown (the love story between Jonathan Hager and his wife, for instance), and then expound on what’s wonderful about the here and now – the fine arts museum, the symphony orchestra, the skiing.
“I’ve noticed a wry and amusing pathological modesty, that a lot of people don’t believe it’s a great place,” he says. “It is a great place.”
Thomas Watson
Executive Director, Rural Support Partners; North Carolina
Thomas Watson moved to Asheville, N.C. to start the nonprofit Center for Participatory Change.
“My passion for community change work comes from growing up in Galax, Va., with a single mother who struggled to make a better life,” Watson says. “I graduated high school with no vision for my future. When I was 19, I was laid off from my first factory job.”
While volunteering for Big Brothers Big Sisters, he realized he loved working with kids. That’s when he discovered the work of community organizing.
Today, Watson’s work with Rural Support Partners focuses on the economy, environment and social justice in rural communities.
Talia Freeman
Beech Mountain Resort, North Carolina
Beech Mountain runs in the family - Talia Freeman’s mother, an artist, worked at the resort in the 1970s, and Freeman has just completed her fifth year at Beech, where she is director of marketing and sales. An athlete herself (she went to Lees-McRae College on a softball scholarship), she has been instrumental in building Beech’s mountain biking offerings to the point that the resort hosted USA Cycling’s Mountain Bike Gravity Nationals in 2012 (she readily admits she’s a beginner biker herself).
“Western North Carolina offers an incredibly diverse terrain, combined with some of the most beautiful, scenic trails in the country.” She credits Lees-McRae College, the town of Beech Mountain, and the resort’s trail developer, Christopher Herndon, with being part of landing the Gravity Nationals.
Sports and wellness are passions for Freeman, who coaches for the nonprofit Girls on the Run. Her goals: to make outdoor sports in North Carolina affordable and accessible to youth, to promote the state’s outdoor assets, keep producing four-season events at Beech Mountain, and run a marathon.
Ed Walker
Social entrepreneur, developer, lawyer, founder of CityWorks;Virginia
“A sense of place and the opportunity for positive impact is important to everyone, and we all have the opportunity to either strengthen or weaken where we live.”
Ed Walker has strengthened where he lives – Roanoke, Va. – revitalizing downtown by buying and renovating old buildings to be re-visioned as residences and businesses, including Kirk Avenue Music Hall and micro-cinema, pocket parks, shops and restaurants; apartments from a cotton mill, a department store and a historic hotel. He’s received a Loeb fellowship to study placemaking at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and when we caught up with him he was in between flights to Boston, New York, Quito, Ecuador and Richmond, Va. The New York Times profiled him in July 2012.
“Roanoke, like most places, has talented people – from commerce, education, arts and culture, technology, government and many other fields – that can create extraordinary achievement in unexpected places and unexpected ways,” Walker says.
Leah Wong Ashburn
Highland Brewing Company; North Carolina
Leah Wong Ashburn has joined a family business – her father, Oscar Wong (whose first career was in engineering) started the Highland Brewing Company in the 1990s, moving from Charlotte to Asheville.
“I was 24 when the brewery opened and I recall him working lots of hours, putting in time on the road, and feeling frustration from dumping three batches of beer when they were planning on releasing it. From the start, quality and consistency has been non-negotiable.”
She wanted to work for him then: “I asked Dad for a job as a beer rep. He didn’t hire me! He told me to find my way first. I did – and had a great career.” She worked for a yearbook publishing company, combining her interests in writing, photography, design and “details.” She came back to the company 15 years later.
“Remember when we all thought coffee was coffee and it was 50 cents a cup? Starbucks showed us a much richer and more flavorful version, and now local roasters are doing their thing. Same with ice cream – everything changed when Haagen Dasz and Ben & Jerry’s showed what fuller flavor – with a good dose of creativity – tastes like...
“Simply put, the craft beer movement echoes the local food movement.”
Highland works to be green and sustainable, giving spent grain to a local farmer, helping in environmental efforts. Their awards aren’t just for beer, but for environmental excellence, leadership and hospitality.
Damien and Betsy Heath
Owners, Lot 12 Public House; West Virginia
Food is something of an art for Damien and Betsy Heath. Damien, a chef who trained in Wilmington, N.C., Baltimore, Md. and Ireland, met his wife Betsy in Shepherdstown, W.Va. After working in North and South Carolina, they decided to come back to Berkeley Springs to open a restaurant in Damien’s hometown, where both his parents are artists.
The restaurant is named for exactly where it’s located – the original Lot #12 in the Town of Bath. The house dates from 1913.
“Everything was there – we just had to clean it up a little bit,” says Damien. “It’s nice and elegant, but we don’t want to be the stuffy, jacket-required” kind of restaurant.
But beyond the restaurant space, the Heaths are part of the local food movement, members of Slow Food USA, Local Harvest and other organizations, working with local farmers, greenhouses, coffee roasters and growers with the goal not only of serving fresh, organic and local food but supporting sustainable agriculture.
Elaina Arenz-Smith
Owner, New River Mountain Guides, Access Fund Athlete Ambassador; West Virginia
Elaina Arenz-Smith started climbing when she was a student at UT-Austin. She used to visit West Virginia every summer for two weeks, and fell in love with the community in Fayetteville, and finally moved there 10 years ago. A year later, she bought New River Mountain Guides from the former owner, a friend.
“I had a lot of experience teaching climbing and working as a guide, but hadn’t thought of making it my living until the opportunity presented itself.” Since 2004, she’s grown the business by double digits and started programs including kids’ climbing camps, women’s programs, yoga/climbing retreats and partnerships with professional climbers.
“I love how warm and welcoming the people of West Virginia are, and the New River Gorge climbing community is very inclusive…
“There are days when I go climbing and I don’t see another soul other than my climbing partner. It’s an easy place to escape to and reconnect with the things in life that really matter.”
Dreama Gentry
Executive Director, Externally Sponsored Programs, Berea College; Kentucky
Dreama Gentry’s job title may not express fully the extent of her work’s impact. Gentry directs an annual budget of $20 million and a staff of 140, with the goal of encouraging young people in rural Appalachian Kentucky to go on to college. It's based at Berea College, which has built a long history of reaching out to empower first-generation college students, many from impoverished areas.
Gentry understands where they’re coming from. “My dad was a construction worker, my mother was a secretary. They never pushed me to go to college, but when I decided I wanted to go they supported that.”
She was an only child, and had strong academics, and her role models were teachers.
Most students at Berea College work their four years in school, and Gentry’s job was in public relations. Her biggest challenge was having to answer the phone – her family never had a phone at home, and “I’d always been introverted and shy.”
After college, Gentry went to law school at University of Kentucky, practiced for a while in Bowling Green, but wanted to do work that made a difference. She came back to Berea with two sons and a husband. At that point, her position was part-time; she had one other employee, and they worked with one middle school and one high school. Federal funding and vision did the rest: they now work with 19 school districts made up of more than 13,000 youth.
Kirk Hazen
Director, West Virginia Dialect Project, English Professor, West Virginia University
It might sound obscure, but Kirk Hazen’s area of study – sociolinguistics – “contains a little bit of everything.” Originally from outside Detroit, Hazen ended up in West Virginia because “there were three jobs of what I do, I think, in the world, and the one in West Virginia was closer.”
Fifteen years later, Hazen is director of the West Virginia Dialect Project, and has devoted his time at West Virginia University to studying the speech patterns of the state – evolving and disappearing phrases, the influences of both north and south. He works with students on the research, collecting interviews with people (more than 180 so far) and analyzing what they’ve recorded. The students are undergraduate, and some come out of the work with published articles, a real accomplishment.
He’s not sentimental about regional changes in language and accent, though – change is “what happens when the people are still alive and the communities are still there.”
Savanna Lyons
Program Director, West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition; West Virginia
“I grew up in northern Virginia, but was lucky to spend part of my summers in Hampshire County [W.Va.] for about 10 years. In college I carried around pictures of the West Virginia mountains and everywhere I went I seemed to meet, befriend or date West Virginians.”
In 2006, Savanna Lyons was able to fulfill a “vague dream” of living in West Virginia, and worked with groups on watersheds and helped with a farmers market in Fayetteville, “which was a good way to make friends with a lot of farmers and other people in our area, and they are what kept me here.”
In 2010, Lyons was hired to start the West Virginia Food & Farm Coalition, part of the West Virginia Community Development Hub (though the coalition will be independent by fall 2013). The coalition works with educators, farmers, policymakers, businesses and state employees to help create a sustainable economy in local food.
“Two weeks ago I spoke at a conference of Appalachian economic developers about ways to help food entrepreneurs.” She recently spoke to state legislators about on-farm poultry processing and school gardens.
“I really value the way of life in West Virginia and want to see rural communities thrive again. We have to find a way to bring our youth back home… This region has a lot to teach.”
Gwynne Rukenbrod
Executive Director, HandMade in America; North Carolina
Gwynne Rukenbrod comes to Asheville, N.C., by way of Ohio, Thailand and Texas. She moved to Asheville in 2011 to HandMade in America. Her artistic background is in glassblowing.
“I used to paint but found the process so tedious and time consuming” – blowing glass remedied that. For the past four years she’s been focusing on a different kind of creativity. Her goal with HandMade: to “continue our history of growing the craft economy in Western North Carolina and making a difference to craft artists worldwide by teaching other organizations to replicate our programs.”
Rukenbrod sees craft and art as a way toward economic stability, not just personal expression. “I truly believe that craft can transform our rural economy and communities.” She sees craft as being in transition.
“The traditional craft artist in Appalachia still exists. There are sixth- and seventh-generations of people living in WNC making the same pieces their ancestors did, but there are also younger newer craft artists living in WNC that are pushing the boundaries of traditional craft by incorporating technology, unique materials, and unusual processes into their work.”
Dr. Anna George
Director, Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute
Kathlina Alford
Research Associate; Tennessee
Anna George, originally from Texas, and Kathlina Alford, from middle Tennessee (her husband’s from Knoxville), both live and work in Chattanooga, researching and teaching at the Tennessee Aquarium.
“Being able to garden, hike, camp, paddle and snorkel for so much of the year is great,” says Alford, “and gives me the chance to appreciate the immense biodiversity and landscapes of the Southeast in up-close and personal ways.”
Their focus: Southern Appalachian brook trout, “the only trout native to the Southeast,” as George points out, and “they are exceptionally pretty.” They’re also under threat – they can only be found in three percent of their historic range in Tennessee and North Carolina. The two scientists have been working on restoration projects in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, with grant money from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
“Fortunately for us, most anyone who is a fly fisherman is already convinced this is an important project!” says George. “Brook trout are one of those fish that anglers just love.”
But it’s not just about recreation: “At a broader level, though, this is about maintaining the rich aquatic biodiversity we have in the Southeast. We have more freshwater fish in Tennessee and Alabama than any other states in the U.S.
“For me, one good reason to protect these species is that they all share with us information about the world.”
Theresa Burriss
Radford University professor, director of RU’s Appalachian Regional Studies Center
Theresa Burriss directs Radford University’s Appalachian Regional Studies Center, which houses the Appalachian Folklife Archives and is the home of a number of programs including the Highland Summer Conference and Appalachian Arts and Studies in the Schools (AASIS). Burriss combines education and scholarship with activism, focusing in particular on mountaintop removal mining (MTR) and racial identity and discrimination. Her students are spending spring breaks learning about coal and environmental issues, and are spending time in Appalachian schools as mentors to young people. “In addition to their heavy loads and demanding classes, they take on more responsibility that isn’t required, simply due to their dedication to making a difference.”
Kelli Billips, Taylor LaPrade, Victoria Curtis, Paige Cordial
Radford University Appalachian Studies students; Virginia
Kelli Billips, Taylor LaPrade and Victoria Curtis all spent spring break 2013 in the mountains of Kentucky, learning about mountaintop removal mining and helping revive the land impacted by it, planting blight-resistant chestnut trees and learning about the history and economy of the region.
The AASIS program inspired Taylor LaPrade to decide to teach instead of go into nursing. She picked up an Appalachian Studies minor, and “fell in love with the history, the culture, and the traditions of both the region and its people.”
The alternative spring break changed her view of young people’s ability to make a difference: “At first, it occurred to me that planting a few trees could not eliminate or completely fix the damage caused by MTR, [but] I realized that it was not only my efforts, but also those of the students combined that one day could truly make a difference.”
Victoria Curtis, from Mechanicsville, Va., is majoring in social science and minoring in Appalachian studies. She wrote in her journal: “This trip provided a perfect opportunity for me to be a part of something so much bigger than myself…
“There are so many stereotypes about the people, the cultures, the practices, the land, and just about everything in this region,” says Curtis. “I have learned that hardly any of these are true…
“I love to learn the ‘why’ of most anything. That is why I love Appalachia. There is so much of the ‘what’ that people know or people think they know (myself included) but the ‘what’ does not hold too much value until you pair it with a ‘why.’…
“It does not matter if a person is pro-coal or against it, because from what I have seen so far, the people who live here have this sense of pride about themselves and their cause. They care!
“I am not used to seeing that, or maybe I just haven’t let myself see that until now.”
“I grew up on an 80-acre farm,” says Kelli Billips, who’s from Bluefield, W.Va. She grew up making apple butter and maple syrup, with cattle, helping her grandparents plant. She remembers planting sunflower seeds at the beginning of summer, and taking the sunflowers to the fair at the end of summer: “Watching something grow from a small little sprout to something big like a sunflower” – that was inspiration.
She plans to move back to Bluefield after she graduates to help take care of her grandparents – they spent so many years “keepin’ the weeds out of me.”
Paige Cordial, who grew up on Big Sewell Mountain, W.Va., is a doctoral student in counseling psychology at RU. She’s been living in the midst of mountaintop removal mining and working with communities, writing her dissertation on how MTR affects wellness in central Appalachia, partnering with activists Kathy Selvage, who’s based in Appalachia, and Jason Fults, who's in Florida.
“I want people in the area to have work and to make a good living, and MTR coal mining helps some people do that. However, I feel that it’s negative effects on the land and on the health of the people far outweigh its economic benefits for the few. Also, the beauty of our region is unsurpassed and offers us such richness even when so many of us live in poverty.”