Call for proposals

Edited collection: READING ROBERT GIPE

Deadline for abstracts:  Dec. 1, 2025

Deadline for final drafts: Nov 1, 2026

We invite proposals for contributions to a new edited volume compiling scholarship, ephemera, and testimony on author Robert Gipe and his collected work in Appalachian literature, theatre, film, activism, and illustration. Since the 2015 publication of his debut novel, Trampoline (Ohio UP), Robert Gipe has become a force in Appalachian literary and cultural studies. The publication of Weedeater (2018) and Pop (2021) completed his award-winning Canard County trilogy; his work became deeply influential, as evidenced by a new tenth-anniversary edition of Trampoline set for release in 2025.

This edited collection will center new writing about Gipe’s trilogy of novels while also highlighting his work supporting filmmaking at Appalshop, producing theatre at Higher Ground, and teaching a generation of young people in Harlan, Kentucky. Likewise, we hope contributors will consider writing about the reach and impact of Gipe’s presence at Hindman, his television script consulting work on Dopesick, his film production work on Carter Sickels’ novel The Evening Hour, his activism, his collaborations, and his influence as a writer’s writer who supports and promotes Appalachian authors past, present, and future.

This collection is designed to be engaging and informative for everyday readers of Gipe’s novels, as well as a resource for scholars and teachers of his work. In keeping with Gipe’s irreverent style and broad-based influence, we welcome outside-the-box contributions in addition to creative, scholarly, or archival submissions that align with the following possible topics:

•  Biographical work contextualizing Gipe’s East Tennessee roots, including Eastman Chemical, Pals, pickle-packing, radio, punk music, zine culture, or UMass American Studies

•  Gipe’s cultural work in and from the Appalachian institutions Appalshop and Hindman

•  Gipe’s decade of work building the Harlan, Ky., political theatre collaboration Higher Ground, including scholarship and/or documentation, interviews, images, testimony, or other archival materials   

•  Gipe on TV and film, including Dopesick (script consulting) and The Evening Hour (film production)

•  Gipe in and of Appalachian studies, his work shaping the field, the region, and its urgent scholarly, social, and political causes

•  Pedagogical approaches to and experiences with Gipe’s work in the classroom

•  Gipe at the moment, includingcurrent innovations, online interventions, new collaborative work

•  Work on any or all of the Canard County novels: Trampoline, Weedeater, Pop. Topics might include, but are not limited to the following:

o   Gipe’s hybrid storytelling: the role of drawing, mixed media illustration, comics  

o   Themes of community and connection, (im)mobility and escape

o   Postmodern elements: fourth-wall breaks, metatextual, intertextual strategies

o   Violence, pain, suicidality, and despair

o   Humor, comedy, tragi-comedy, dark comedy

o   Appalachian stereotypes, tropes, authenticity

o   Audience, reception, criticism, reader-response   

o   Point-of-view, narrative strategies, voice 

o   Food, drink, and foodways

o   Gender studies: masculinities, feminisms

o   LGBTQ+ representations, perspectives, queer readings

o   Music, indie radio, public radio, tv, popular culture

o   Addiction, opioids, alcohol, self-harm

o   Political contexts: Trumpism, online political culture 

o   Coal country: extractive economies and landscapes

o   Activism and resistance

o   Comparative work: Gipe and other writers

o   Ecologies, environment, climate, ecocritical approaches

Please send 500-word abstracts and brief bios to Anna Creadick (creadick@hws.edu)

and Erica Abrams Locklear (elocklea@unca.edu) by December 1, 2025. Contributors will be notified by January 15, 2026, and completed essays will be due byNovember 1, 2026.  Ohio University Press, home of Gipe’s fiction, has expressed keen interest in publishing this collection.