Born in the shadow of a Civil War battlefield and raised barefoot on a small farm in southeastern Tennessee, the poet carries a particular country inside her — one measured not in acreage but in the faces of those who worked it, loved it, and passed something wordless down through the generations.

Appalachian Roots: Poems of Mountain, Memory, and Home moves through four sections — The Land Speaks, What Is Inherited, Becoming, Returning Home — tracing the contours of a life shaped by place. One voice carries these poems, but many lives move through it: ancestors known only through inherited gesture and stubborn silence, family both given and chosen, and the land itself, which asks nothing and remembers everything.

These are not poems of nostalgia. They are poems of reckoning. Quiet in register, precise in image, and rooted in the literary tradition of the American South, this chapbook is for readers who know that where you come from is not merely biography. It is character.