Book + Art | Fiction and Photos of Appalachia

September’s Book + Art lecture features an author and artist couple, Stephanie and Jeff Whetstone. Stephanie will speak about her debut novel Deep Belly of the Earth a haunting, intimate story of friendship, marriage, motherhood and the fierce pull of home set in a Kentucky coal mining community, while her husband Jeff Whetstone, Professor of Photography at Princeton, will speak about his latest collection of photographs of Appalachia, including the one on the cover of Deep Belly of the Earth. SYNOPSIS of Deep Bell of the Earth Ava Maynard makes the difficult decision to leave her small coal mining town in Eastern Kentucky to make a life for herself and her son, Joshua, in the city. Her husband, Collis, won’t leave the mountains, even though he has been laid off from his job as a miner. When tragedy strikes, Ava reluctantly slips back into her spot in this troubled world, relying on her deepest friendships to guide her. Author Bio Stephanie Whetstone earned her BA at Duke and her MFA in Creative Writing from UNC-Greensboro, where she was Fiction Editor of the Greensboro Review. She has been a fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hambidge, and a Peter Taylor Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. Her fiction has appeared in Tulip Tree Review, Waccamaw, Waypoints, Drafthorse, the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and Narrative. A native of Kentucky, she now lives in Brooklyn. Jeff Whetstone imagines rural America through the lenses of mythology and biology. Whetstone’s work has been exhibited internationally and has received reviews in ArtForum, Art in America, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. Whetstone earned his MFA from the Yale School of Photography in 2001, where he received the George Sakier Prize for Photography. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council, his work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nasher Museum, the Nelson Atkins Museum, the Cleveland Art Museum, the Yale Art Gallery, the New York Public Library, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Whetstone is a Professor of the Practice of Art at Princeton University. Purchase Tickets