A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia

About this book

Northern Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and home to a broad range of ecological and human cultures. With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis and Noah Davis recognise and celebrate this diversity and the fact that humans are storytelling creatures who develop relationships with their landscapes at the intersection of art and science.

A companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, this guide introduces the reader to seventy indigenous species found in Northern Appalachia, a region comprising parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. As a hybrid literary and natural history anthology, the book consists of descriptions and notes on habitat, range, and ecology provided by six scientists with expertise in the region's flora and fauna. In addition, eleven artists and seventy poets have provided original artwork and poetry that illuminate the lives of the greater-than-human world.

Defying easy stereotypes, the guide presents trees, shrubs, wildflowers and mammals, birds and fish, reptiles and amphibians, and invertebrates and fungi. Love and wonder for these ancient mountains and their ever-evolving residents flood the pages of this book, inviting the reader into a deeper way of knowing a place and the lives dependent on it.

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Biography

Todd Davis is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry-Coffin Honey; Native Species; Winterkill; In the Kingdom of the Ditch; The Least of These; Some Heaven; and Ripe-as well as of a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University's Altoona College. He lives in Tipton, Pennsylvania.

Noah Davis is the author of The Last Beast We Revel In and Of This River. His poems and prose have appeared in the Sun, the Christian Science Monitor, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, and the Year's Best Sports Writing, among other publications. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and was raised along the Allegheny Front in Tipton, Pennsylvania.

Carolyn Mahan is Professor of biology and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her work has been published in a variety of scientific journals including Environmental Management, Global Change Biology, Conservation Biology, and Journal of Mammalogy. Mahan currently serves on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's Advisory Council for Conservation. She lives in State College, Pennsylvania.