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Come join us for an evening with Natalie Sypolt and Pauletta Hansel as they do readings from their new books and engage in conversation with Rachael Meads of Shepherd University. Both authors will be open to audience questions and will be doing a signing after the event.Natalie Sypolt is the author of The Sound of Holding Your Breath. Her writing has appeared in Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, Superstition Review, Paste, Willow Springs Review, and The Kenyon Review Online. Sypolt is the winner of the Glimmer Train New Writers Contest, the Betty Gabehart Prize, the West Virginia Fiction Award, and the Still fiction contest. She is a professor of English at Pierpont Community & Technical College and former president of the Appalachian Studies Association. Her latest book If Only The Rain Would Come is an unvarnished story about an Appalachian town—from the modern women who carve out an existence for themselves to the complicated men who upend their lives.
Pauletta Hansel is a poet, memoirist, teacher, and editor who has authored 11 poetry collections, including Heartbreak Tree, Palindrome, and Will There Also Be Singing? She served as the first poet laureate of Cincinnati and is the winner of the 2026 Judy Gaines Young Book Award. In her latest book Understory, she weaves history, genealogy, memoir, and poetry to chronicle the untold story of her foremothers. Hansel does not shy away from hard truths, such as her family's enslavement of people of African descent, their support for the Confederacy, and their displacement of Indigenous people. Through research, her travels across the US, and her own family stories and memories, she makes visible those whose lives were hidden between the lines of documents left behind.
Rachael Meads is a Shepherd University Alumni who teaches as an adjunct faculty member for the Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities program.
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114 W German St, Shepherdstown, WV, United States, West Virginia 25443
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