MGC welcomes Kenton Butcher as he shares “Country Roads and Paper Trails”, part of a book project called Illegible: Black Appalachian Self-Publishing, 1990-2010.  The talk will begin with the history of Appalachian stereotypes and the way in which they skew ideas about the history of the region and its inhabitants. It shows that one of the effects of Appalachian stereotypes is to erase the history of people of color from the region, and the talk then looks at how Black Appalachians have used self-publishing to preserve and transmit their own histories. While many people consider self-published books as unimportant or unsuccessful—and in an age when A. I. seems to make human writing obsolete—this talk is also about why self-authorship and self-publishing remains vital. 

Kenton Butcher is an assistant professor at Bucknell University where he teaches courses in African American literature. He graduated from Federal Hocking High School in 2005 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023. He recently received a fellowship from the Institute of Citizens and Scholars to complete his first book project, titled Illegible: Black Appalachian Self-Publishing, 1990-2010.