Another Appalachia

Neema Avashia is the proud daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library's Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Avashia was a recipient of the ACLU of West Virginia's 2024 Roger Baldwin Award for her work on behalf of LGBTQIA+ West Virginians. Her second book, Becoming Ammi: A Queer, Desi Journey into Parenthood, will be published by Beacon Press in April 2027. Avashia lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and their daughter, Kahani.
Ed Simon a writer, professor, and founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. The author of over twenty books, he now lives in his native city of Pittsburgh.
Robert Gipe is a novelist, educator, producer, and community arts leader. He is author of The Canard Trilogy, an award-winning series of illustrated novels. Gipe resides in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Directions to a Vanishing Place
Chemical Bonds
Nine Forms of the Goddess
Be Like Wilt
The Blue-Red Divide
City Mouse/Country Mouse
Finding the Holy in an Unholy Coconut
Wine-Warmth
Magic Dust
A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy
Neighbors
The Hindu Hillbilly Spice Company
Shame-Shame
Our Armor
A History of Guns
Present-Life Hair
Only-Generation Appalachian
Thanks, Y’all

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.
Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

“This book lives beautifully in the gray area of trying to navigate a divisive environment while growing up queer and Asian American.”
Forbes“I’m glad this memoir exists . . . and I’m especially glad it’s so good.”
Vauhini Vara, New York Magazine
“A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions.”
Scalawag
“A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience.”
Ms. Magazine

“Evocative and thought-provoking.”
​Bitch Media
“Compelling and refreshing. . . . Appalachia needs more people like Neema Avashia.”
Daily Yonder
“Readers may be Indian, Appalachian, and queer or they may be some or none of these things. No matter—Avashia’s beautifully rendered prose contains insights to which everyone can relate.”
Still: The Journal
“This book gave me such tenderness toward a place that parsing my thoughts about it was like scooping up tadpoles with my bare hands.”
Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism
“Another Appalachia is a breath of fresh air, a work that the public is in dire need of reading. Wide and expansive as the land the author calls home, this essay collection subverts the mainstream’s hyperfocus on white male-dominated narratives from rural America and commands your attention from the first page to the last word.”
Morgan Jerkins, author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America and Caul Baby
“Neema Avashia, in this book, has named the unnamed, spoken the unspoken so that it does not become—to paraphrase Adrienne Rich—the unspeakable, and she has done so in language that is both lyrical and direct, both entertaining and edifying, both challenging and generous. I love this book and believe it introduces an important voice in America’s ongoing racial reckoning.”
Rahul Mehta, author of No Other World
“An essential text to add to the new canon of Appalachian writing—a compassionate and rigorous memoir of the author’s experience growing up as a queer Hindu child and teenager in a small community of West Virginian Indians. Another Appalachia is a bright and deeply empathetic portrait of a complicated place, a place that Neema Avashia allows to be multifaceted in the way it deserves.”
Anna Claire Weber, White Whale Bookstore