Winner of the 2004 Perugia Press Prize, as well as the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, Kettle Bottom was named an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Book for 2005. It also was the Ohioana Library Association Poetry Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association. It was selected for inclusion in The Pushcart Prize XXX:Best of the Small Presses. 
Based on the historical and social events of the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920-1921, Kettle Bottom imagines the stories of miners, their wives, children, sisters, and mothers; of mountaineers, Italian immigrants, and Black families. These people organized for safe working conditions in opposition to the mine company owners and their agents. Fisher listened closely and the result is a book of vivid, rhythmic, heartfelt poems that address a violent time with honesty, levity, and compassion. Kettle Bottom is about how a community lived in the presence of constant danger and the choices the residents made. These are people to look to today.

Kettle Bottom

Literature & Fiction

Gilliam, Diane

Poetry

Perugia Press

Once upon a time, there lived a girl whose story was not her own. . . So the story goes: Neglected and abused by her family, eclipsed by her elder and more beautiful sister, a young girl longs for happily-ever-after, for something, someone to rescue her. She is soon swept away into the next chapter of her life: marriage―a promising world mirroring Old Testament stories and fairy tale traditions. But loving just anyone and living the age-old “ever-after” narrative, as it turns out, fails to bring true happiness after all. Dragged down by a destructive marriage, her sister’s continued manipulations, and the growing weight of roles and expectations created by others at her back, she must choose between continuing in her familiar, complacent life, or boldly breaking free―and finally making her own way. Named for an Appalachian murder ballad in which a girl is drowned by her sister, this lyrical fairy tale unseats expectations for what it means to live a fairy tale life, revealing the powerful force that comes from stripping away the traditional roles and beginning to write a story all your own.

Dreadful Wind & Rain

Literary

Red Hen Press

Linney Stepp

Saddle Road Press

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Books by Gilliam, Diane