Meredith McCarroll, a lecturer in English at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has been chosen to share the Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She is being honored for the book Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press, 2019), which she co-edited with Tony Harkins, a professor of history at Western Kentucky University.
The book is a collection of essays composed in response to the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (Harper, 2016), written in 2016 by the author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance. Vance’s book talks about his experience growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky.
“It is exciting to see a collection from an academic press receive national attention, which helps bring questions of region and perception into a larger conversation,” said Dr. McCarroll.
At Bowdoin, Dr. McCarroll serves as director of the Writing and Rhetoric program and as director of the First-Year Seminar program. She is also the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (University of Georgia Press, 2016), which looks at how Appalachian people have been stereotyped in the movies.
McCarroll was born and raised in Waynesville, North Carolina, and is a graduate Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree from what is now Simmons University in Boston and a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee.