Contributors to Deviant Hollers, a new collection of queer critiques of settler colonialism in Appalachia, will share their work and discuss possibilities for a sustainable future.

In Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future, more than a dozen writers use the lens of queer ecologies to explore environmental destruction in Appalachia while mapping out alternative futures that follow from critical queer perspectives on the United States' exploitation of the land. With essays by Lis Regula, Jessica Cory, Chet Pancake, Tijah Bumgarner, MJ Eckhouse, and other essential thinkers, this collection brings to light both emergent and long-standing marginalized perspectives that give renewed energy to the struggle for a sustainable future. A new and valuable contribution to the field of Appalachian studies, rural queer studies, Indigenous studies, and ethnographic studies of the United States, Deviant Hollers presents a much-needed objection to the status quo of academic work, as well as to the American exceptionalism and white supremacy pervading US politics and the broader geopolitical climate. By focusing on queer critiques and acknowledging the status of Appalachia as a settler colony, Deviant Hollers offers new possibilities for a reimagined way of life.

Zane McNeill is a scholar-activist from West Virginia. He is the editor of Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia (PM Press, 2022) and co-editor of Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future (University Press of Kentucky, 2024).

Tijah Bumgarner is a filmmaker, scholar, and professor. She teaches narrative and documentary filmmaking at Marshall University. In 2017, she completed her first feature film, Meadow Bridge, a coming-of-age narrative set in rural West Virginia. Currently, she is collaborating with Jena Seiler on a documentary about the opioid epidemic in Appalachia. In both scholarship and practice, Bumgarner seeks to disrupt stereotypes that conform to a single defining narrative of the region.

Chet Pancake is award-winning transmasculine filmmaker, video, new media, and sound artist. He has exhibited at national and international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, Royal Ontario Museum, Murray Art Museum Albury (Australia), Mexican Film Institute, and Shanghai Conservatory of Music (PRC). 

Maxwell Cloe is scholar of queer Appalachian art and archives. They operate the Wildcrafting Our Queerness Project, a digital exhibition of queer Appalachian art, oral history, and theory. They are an instructor of community studies at the College of William & Marys.

Lis Regula is a lecturer in the biology department at the University of Dayton. In his professional role, Lis is an out trans man teaching biology and anatomy in an accurate and inclusive manner to future health-care professionals. In his free time, Lis serves on the board of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio, League of Women Voters of Ohio, Ohioans for Sustainable Change, and Highland Youth Garden. He also works to facilitate peer support groups, serves on his synagogue’s men’s Chevra Kadisha Committee, and does what he can to organize advocacy efforts around progressive policies in Ohio.

Jessica Cory teaches in the English Department at Appalachian State University and is a PhD candidate specializing in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the editor of Mountains Piled Upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene and the co-editor of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place. Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications.