Almost everyone has heard of the Mothman — West Virginia’s best known cryptid. But have you heard of Veggie Man? That’s another West Virginia cryptid. And it helped inspire a zine project from the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University. Producer Bill Lynch spoke with the center’s director, Lydia Warren, about the forthcoming publication, which is taking submissions.
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Jessica Lilly and Roxy Todd – Featured Speakers at WV Wesleyan Conference
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Jessica Lilly and Roxy Todd, two of West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s award-winning reporters, will be keynote speakers at The ENGAGE Conference of Leadership for Change. The conference will be held on Saturday, March 25, at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, WV.
Jessica and Roxy have won numerous awards for their journalism and storytelling. In particular, one 2015 episode called “Inside Appalachia: When Strangers Take Our Picture”, won the best Documentary from the Regional Associated Press, and a Murrow award for best documentary.
Roxy Todd is a producer for Inside Appalachia.
The conference is geared toward high school and college students who are passionate about developing their leadership skills to affect positive social change in their communities.
Roxy Todd is a producer for Inside Appalachia. She’s originally from Tennessee and moved to West Virginia in 2010 to work as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, collecting oral histories for a project called Traveling 219. She has worked for West Virginia Public Broadcasting since 2014. She lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
Jessica Lilly covers southern West Virginia for West Virginia Public Radio and is the host and producer of Inside Appalachia. A lifelong southern West Virginian, she graduated from Concord University, where she now teaches part time. Jessica is also the faculty advisor to Concord University’s radio station, WVCU LPFM, a station she was instrumental in launching. She lives in Athens, West Virginia
Almost everyone has heard of the Mothman — West Virginia’s best known cryptid. But have you heard of Veggie Man? That’s another West Virginia cryptid. And it helped inspire a zine project from the Frank and Jane Gabor West Virginia Folklife Center at Fairmont State University. Producer Bill Lynch spoke with the center’s director, Lydia Warren, about the forthcoming publication, which is taking submissions.
Five years ago, the COVID-19 lockdowns kept a lot of people out of public spaces — and a lot of artists used that time to create. Like the Cornelius Eady Trio. The group is organized around Cornelius Eady, a poet and professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, whose writing has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. With the help of musicians Lisa Liu and Charlie Rauh, Eady puts his words to music.
John Haywood of Whitesburg, Kentucky says he got his first guitar and his first tattoo when he was about 13 years old. These days, Haywood is the proprietor of Parlor Room Art and Tattoo in downtown Whitesburg. It’s a place where some people get inked up … and some play traditional music. It’s a place unlike any other, as Zack Harold reports.
There is a rich tradition of Black Appalachian poets and writers. One of the newest is Torli Bush, who grew up in Webster Springs, West Virginia. Bush has won poetry slams in the region, and now has a new book, Requiem for a Redbird. Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Bush about the book.
