A Book Talk with Willie Carver Jr.

Kentucky Teacher of the Year and queer Appalachian icon Willie Carver returns to Bookmarks!

Join Bookmarks for an evening with Willie Carver Jr., author of Tore All to Pieces on Friday, April 10! Willie Carver Jr. is the author of Gay Poems for Red States and was nominated Kentucky Teacher of the Year in 2022. Event attendees may remember Willie from previous Bookmarks appearances! Willie will be joined in conversation by Abby Freeland, co-founder of the book series Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices at the University Press of Kentucky.

Register for this free event and learn more about his new release, Tore All to Pieces, a fragmented novel examining life in a rural Appalachian town. Copies of the book will be available for purchase with registration as well as the night of the event.

Have any questions? Check out our Event FAQs page and email events@bookmarksnc.org for further inquiries.

About the Book

Nestled in the mountains, in an out-of-the-way part of rural America, the fictional town of Mosely is home to ordinary people: proud, compassionate, and complex. Women serving biscuits at the gas station counter, kids listening to Loretta Lynn with their uncles, teenage boys flirting with one another at prom, and parents busy raising their children's babies. This community is woven together by family ties, church congregations, coal mines, and fast-food chains. In Mosely, the residents work hard to find belonging, love, and identity.

Tore All to Pieces is a fragmented novel that delves into the lives of Appalachian characters with similar struggles, backgrounds, and experiences and examines how people are often lonely despite these connections. Each narrative, presented in the form of a poem or short story, bends and weaves like the roads of Appalachia. Each character's voice is richly portrayed in gripping and lyrical language, uniting the stories in a quest for truth, genuine understanding, and respect.

At a time when the rights of queer individuals, women, and people of color are increasingly under threat, this work powerfully reaffirms the humanity and significance of marginalized people. Tore All to Pieces underscores their enduring presence and rightful belonging.

About the Author

Willie Carver Jr. is a public speaker, advocate for minoritized youth, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and the author of Gay Poems for Red States, a Stonewall, American Library Association, Read Appalachia, Whippoorwill, Book Riot, and Global Pride Award–winning collection about growing up queer in Appalachia. His fragmented novel Tore All to Pieces will be published in Spring 2026 by the University Press of Kentucky.

His work appears in Southern Humanities, Good River Review, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Harbor Review, and Appalachian Journal. He has contributed chapters to Rural Education and Queer Identities (Routledge 2025), Trouble in Censorville (Disobedience 2024), and several anthologies, including Testament (Backwoods 2026) and Had I a Dove (RedHawk 2025). He writes regularly for MSNBC and has been featured on NPR and Good Morning America.

Willie writes from eastern Kentucky and believes everyone deserves to feel that they matter.

About the Conversation Partner

Abby Freeland is a book publishing professional with twenty years of experience. She began her career in the UK before returning to her home state of West Virginia, where she served as the sales and marketing director, head publicist, and fiction editor at West Virginia University Press for over ten years. She then spent four years as a senior acquisitions editor at the University Press of Kentucky, where she co-founded and managed the book series Appalachian Futures: Black, Native, and Queer Voices and acquired in several other areas, including creative nonfiction.