Where You Are From Christopher — Lee Nelson

When a North Carolina milltown loses its factory, it goes down hard. And if that's where you're from, you have to decide whether you're going down with it. Nelson follows the benighted residents of Tucker, N.C. with an eye that misses nothing, in a gorgeous prose at once elegiac and humane without the slightest hint of sentimentality. Add this book immediately to Appalachian Literature's highest shelf. -- Wilton Barnhardt, author of Lookaway, Lookaway and Western Alliances Christopher Nelson's debut volume of stories, Where You Are From, is a wonderfully gripping contemplation of how place - the North Carolina Appalachian foothills hamlet of Tucker in the shadow the Brushy Mountains - exerts a chokehold on his cherished, unforgettable characters, linked by locus and their desperate yearning to escape what they've paradoxically come to love and loathe in equal measure. Nelson keenly depicts the very ether they inhale, what they eat for breakfast, the thwarted dreams they ponder as the sun sets, and the words that spill from their mouths. These stories are written with a poet's ear, the documentarian's exhaustive gaze, and the visceral gut-attention to detail and authenticity it takes for a writer to get it right the first time.- Joseph Bathanti, former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and author of The Act of Contrition & Other Stories About The AuthorChristopher L. Nelson is a native of Lenoir, NC who received his MFA from North Carolina State University. After teaching at a mid-western university for several years, he currently lives between Greensboro and Western North Carolina with his partner, two cats, and a dog.