In conjunction with the Appalachian Heritage Writers Project and the Appalachian Heritage Festival at Shepherd University, Belleville native Randi Ward was announced as the winner of the 2019 Appalachian Anthology Photographic Art Award. The award will be presented at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education in Shepherdstown, WV on September 24 during the “Celebration of Appalachian Song, Storytelling, and Photographic Art” program.

Ward is among the photographers, poets, scholars, essayists, and fiction writers included in the 2019 volume of Shepherd University’s Anthology of Appalachian Writers. Ward’s “Surfacing” was selected by Art Curator Michael Mendez for this year’s award. 

“Surfacing” was photographed in Belleville, WV as were the other two images by Ward that appear in the new anthology. An exhibition celebrating the artwork featured in the 2019 anthology will remain on display in the Scarborough Library Reading Room at Shepherd University through September 30. The exhibition is free and open to the public and includes work by award-winning photographers such as Athens Poet Laureate Kari Gunter-Seymour and Rachel Herbaugh.

The eleventh volume of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers revolves around 2018 WV Common Read Author Karen Spears Zacharias’s themes regarding the complexity of family relationships, PTSD, and the generational traumas of war and violence. Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, Appalachian Studies Coordinator at Shepherd University and Senior Managing Editor of the anthology, called the book “one of the most ambitious yet for the series.”

The rest of this article can be read in The Parkersburg News and Sentinel.