Mission Statement

The mission of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia is to support writers from, living in, or writing about the greater northern Appalachian region by providing opportunities to share work and expertise, publish written work, and develop relationships with editors, publishers, literary scholars, readers, and fellow writers. We provide opportunities for the region’s writers to build a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community.

WANA’s History

As writers and educators who grew up in Northern Appalachia, we often felt alone in our quest to find a regional literary peer group. That changed in 2011 at the Northern Appalachia in Word and Song Conference held at California University of Pennsylvania (now Pennsylvania Western University at California), which was sponsored by the Northern Appalachian Network, an institute founded at PennWest California in 2007. Christina Fisanick served on the planning committee and Damian Dressick presented his work at this conference, which featured Jennifer Haigh as the keynote speaker. This event marked a continuation of conversations we had been having in small groups with colleagues across the sub-region at events like the Appalachian Studies Conference and the Northern Appalachian Folk Festival. Through organizations like the Northern Appalachian Network, we were able to build enough synergy to found the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA) in 2018. Since then we have worked with writers and thinkers across all five states to identify and better understand the geographical and thematic boundaries and possibilities of what we have come to see as Northern Appalachian literature.

Advocacy

WANA President, Christina Fisanick, wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Barbara Kingsolver’s article, Read Your Way Through Appalachia. Her letter was published on Sunday, September 24, 2023.