Howdy
I am an Associate Professor and Chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Perpetually curious of language, the material world, queerness, and place, I am a Kentucky Appalachian expat who researches how literacies create worlds. My teaching spans from business to creative writing, Appalachian studies, and philosophy-informed humanities courses. Since 2022, I've been involved in state politics alongside higher education union activism and served as our university's Chapter President for the Massachusetts State Colleges Association.
What happens to reading and writing when place, emotion, and materiality are just as important as the ability to write or to engage with a text? Grounded in the field of literacy studies, Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival examines the significance of inanimate and other posthuman elements to LGBTQ+ Appalachians, establishing queer storytelling as a transformative methodology for thinking about multifaceted Appalachian identities and spaces. Readers are asked to consider narrative and literacy as forces in the world—changing, flowing, emerging from place, alive in their own way. While focusing on people and their experiences in the region, the book also illustrates the complex literacy practices that LGBTQ+ Appalachians take part in to make meaning and build connections. The resulting analysis challenges our understanding of agency, queerness, and human-centric definitions of literacy.
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By including the stories of queer Appalachians—both the interview participants' and his own—Caleb Pendygraft has written an essential theoretical framework. Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival is a call to imagine a new future in which literacy is animate and dynamic.
University Press of Kentucky, June, 2025