West Virginia

Authors from West Virginia write across genres and generations, and this tag gathers them in one place. Among the state's literary figures, you will find novelists, memoirists and children's authors whose work carries its voices and landscapes. The tag covers literary fiction, romance, suspense and military thrillers, so the thread is not one style but a shared origin.

What separates the authors from West Virginia here from those of neighboring Pennsylvania, or from California and New York, is not simply geography. Jennifer Armentrout writes paranormal and science fiction romance that pulls teenage readers into series, while Jayne Anne Phillips builds literary novels from the state's small towns, and Stephen Coonts writes thrillers of military flight and Washington power. The range runs from the picture books of Marc Harshman and Anna Egan Smucker to the fiction of Rajia Hassib, Rahul Mehta and Keith Maillard. John Hart and Carlene Thompson handle suspense; Homer Hickam turns a coal-camp childhood into memoir and young adult fiction. Together they serve readers who want Appalachian settings and family histories, but also those who simply follow a genre: romance, thriller, memoir, or literary fiction. The closest sibling tags share a border or a market, yet none of them holds this particular mix of coal-country memory and contemporary genre writing.