Fireside Industries

A partnership with the Hindman Settlement School.

Fireside Industries strives to publish creative work by authors with unique perspectives, diverse backgrounds, and compelling voices, who are telling the complex stories of Appalachia and rural America.  We look for books that are driven by language and characters that can inform, entertain, challenge, and illuminate places and people who are often under-represented in literature. 

At Fireside Industries, we want to be a publisher of work that pays homage to the past while also keeping our eyes on the future.  Most of Fireside Industries books will be new acquisitions but occasionally we will also re-issue texts that are foundational or deserve a second, and wider, look.  The imprint is a collaboration between The University Press of Kentucky and Hindman Settlement School.

Awards, Accolades & Reviews

2021 Foreword Reviews’ INDIES Silver Winner, General (Adult Fiction)

Selected as one of “The Best Southern Books of October 2021” by Southern Review of Books

Selected by the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) as one of the featured titles in the 2022 Great Group Reads list

Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award

Clapsaddle’s lush debut thrusts 19-year-old Cowney Sequoyah into WWII intrigue…The clear, crisp prose hums consistently as the intricate story easily moves along and new details about Cowney’s family’s past emerge. Both an astonishing addition to WWII and Native American literature, this novel sings on every level.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

Winner of the Weatherford Award for Poetry

As the title suggests, musical performance supplies narrative material in Worthington’s debut; so does Worthington’s female-specific, Appalachian experience. The political sphere is present in flickers, in, say, a grandfather’s xenophobic World War II racism or (in the title poem) violence against women, where the ‘girl singer’ mourns ‘the women killed in all the murder / ballads I knew.’ … Rhetorical questions can often be edited out of poems, but this one provides passage, in celebration and disgust, to contemplating the waste that unites all creatures.

The New York Times

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