GLENVILLE, WV – As part of the ongoing Little Kanawha Reading Series, Glenville State University will play host to Robert Gipe on Thursday, January 26 at 4:00 p.m. in the Robert F. Kidd Library. The event is free and open to the public.

Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel. His novels Weedeater (2018) and Pop (2021) completed a trilogy that won the Judy Gaines Young Book award in 2021. Gipe directed the Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan and is a founding producer of the Higher Ground community performance series. He has served as a script consultant for the Hulu series Dopesick and a producer on the feature film The Evening Hour.

The online recommendation guide BookPage said, “With Trampoline and Weedeater, Gipe delivers some of the most vivid Appalachian characters we’ve ever read. There are no clichés or stereotypes here. Illustrations of Dawn and Gene deliver clever one-liners and elevate the narration to a face-to-face relationship with the reader.”

“Pop is refreshingly queer…a mediation on the relationship between representation and ‘reality,’ a love letter to storytelling. Gipe’s haunting, enervating, imagery-laden, yet gloriously simple prose makes Pop an Appalachian novel of the ages,” said Julia Lindsay for Southern Literary Review.

The Little Kanawha Reading Series is a collaboration between Glenville State’s Department of Language and Literature, Appalachian Studies Program, and the Robert F. Kidd Library. Its purpose is to provide a showcase for a diversity of literary forms and voices in order to acknowledge and enrich the cultural heritage of Appalachia and the communities around the Little Kanawha River.

For more information about the Little Kanawha Reading Series, contact (304) 462-6322.