What happens to reading and writing when place, emotion, and materiality are just as important as the ability to write or to engage with a text? Grounded in the field of literacy studies, Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival examines the significance of inanimate and other posthuman elements to LGBTQ+ Appalachians, establishing queer storytelling as a transformative methodology for thinking about multifaceted Appalachian identities and spaces. Readers are asked to consider narrative and literacy as forces in the world--changing, flowing, emerging from place, alive in their own way. While focusing on people and their experiences in the region, the book also illustrates the complex literacy practices that LGBTQ+ Appalachians take part in to make meaning and build connections. The resulting analysis challenges our understanding of agency, queerness, and human-centric definitions of literacy. 

By including the stories of queer Appalachians--both the interview participants' and his own--Caleb Pendygraft has written an essential theoretical framework. Reading, Writing, and Queer Survival is a call to imagine a new future in which literacy is animate and dynamic.