Laura Jackson "Deep & Wild," with Lori Jakiela

We are ecstatic to host Laura Jackson in-store to celebrate her debut essay collection, Deep & Wild.

About this Event

We are ecstatic to host Laura Jackson in-store to celebrate her debut essay collection, Deep & Wild. A lifelong West Virginian, Laura writes with insight, humor, and tenderness about her home state, blending personal narrative with a deep awareness of regional stereotypes and their dismantling. Laura will be in converssation with Lori Jakiela.

Deep & Wild is the debut essay collection of Laura Jackson. Jackson, a lifelong West Virginian, employs her knowledge of and curiosity for the region to describe life in West Virginia while dismantling stereotypes portrayed in popular media with humor and tenderness. Jackson works to describe what is special about her home, looking head-on at all the ways life in West Virginia may be wonderful and terrible, beautiful and ugly. Moving beyond all-too-common Appalachian stories of hardship and poverty, Jackson’s collection revels in joy, family, and nature.

Through her essays, Jackson invites readers to peer under creek rocks for crawfish, look a little more fondly at opossums, a road trip to an annual ramp festival, and learn why not to trust a GPS along West Virginia’s rugged roads. From her living room to Appalachian hollows, Jackson approaches the sublime, seeking truths in the removal of a stump from her backyard and in John Denver’s famous song, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” As Jackson reflects, “As writers, we know it’s our job, not only to tell our stories but to tell the stories of those who came before us, who never had a turn at the microphone.”

Praise for Deep & Wild

2025 Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia Book of the Year

"Wide-ranging and marvelously specific, Jackson’s charming book will give readers insight into a misunderstood state." —Booklist

". . . a thoughtful, raucous love song to Jackson’s home state, its landscape, and its culture." —The Fourth River

"Essayistic and investigative, yearning and reaching, Laura Jackson’s Deep & Wild lurks in the dark and deep to clutch at treasures beneath. An examination of the self intersected within small unknowns, there is nothing small that is not significant. This is a cultural reckoning and illumination, a compilation of layers of time and place alongside hidden and invisible losses and epiphanies, Jackson writes with the brilliant meanderings of a true essayistic mind, taking her time, leading us into the “dark eyes” of what she witnesses inwardly as we watch." —Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

"In prose reminiscent of writers like Susan Orlean and Annie Dillard, but with a fresh and exuberant voice all her own, Jackson conjures her beloved West Virginia in prose equal parts hilarious and heart-wrenching. Jackson shatters Mountain-Dew-hillbilly stereotypes (and takes down fancy-pants-ers like Bette Midler, who spread such Hollywood-centric nonsense on social media) to show the true, complicated, deeply-rooted truth of Appalachia. . . . I would declare, in 2024, that Laura Jackson be dubbed one of the official voices of West Virginia. There is no one writing with so much love, insight, humor, and heart, about this magical place she and so many of us call home." —Lori Jakiela, author of They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So

"Laura Jackson’s Deep & Wild stretches beyond the cliches of possums, moonshine, and John Denver’s country roads to fully embrace West Virginia’s contradictions, its beauty, and its wild wonder. Jackson’s essays are hilarious, insightful, and wise, and will have you reading along with a wide grin." —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire

LAURA JACKSON is an environmental writer and humorist. Her debut essay collection, Deep & Wild: On Mountains, Opossums & Finding Your Way in West Virginia, was selected by Jenny Boully as the winner of the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize and was named the 2025 Best Book of the Year by the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia. Jackson received an MFA from Chatham University, and her work has appeared in many places, including Terrain.org, the Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, Still, and Bayou Magazine. Her work was listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2021 and has been nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize and the 2024 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. A West Virginian, mountain mama, and wild woman, she wanders country roads, hikes, paddles, climbs, tubes, skis, camps, and rescues homeless animals. She has an affinity for moss, Appalachian spirits, the smell of a red spruce forest, and the Virginia opossum.

LORI JAKIELA is the author of seven books, including the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Award, and was named one of 20 Not-To-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Her most recent book, They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So, was published by Atticus Books in October 2023. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, LA Cultural Weekly, Brevity, Chautauqua Magazine, Belt, and more. A former international flight attendant, Jakiela directs the writing program at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, teaches creative writing in the doctoral program at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and leads many community workshops. She lives in her hometown--Trafford, Pennsylvania (the last stop in Pittsburgh's Electric Valley)-- with her husband, the author Dave Newman, and their children.

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