Summary

2023 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Named the BEST LGBTQ+ MEMOIR of 2022 by Book Riot
Named a New York Public Library Best Book of 2022
Weatherford Award finalist, nonfiction

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.

Contents

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

Author

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

Reviews

“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

“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

“Compelling and refreshing. . . . Appalachia needs more people like Neema Avashia.”
Daily Yonder

“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