Ep. 21 - Leah Hampton

Leah Hampton is in the studio this week talking to PBL's Alex McWalters about what it means to love a place deeply enough to criticize it as harshly as you care about it, to live with her characters, to take care of those characters, and to know when she can't anymore. Leah Hampton writes about Appalachia, corpses, ecoanxiety, and smart women. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. Her debut collection, F*ckface and Other Stories, was released by Henry Holt and was named one of the best books of 2020 by The Paris Review, the New York Public Library, and Slate. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she has been awarded multiple prizes and fellowships and held residencies at the Stadler Center for Poetry, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Hedgebrook, Jentel, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in places like Ecotone, Guernica, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, storySouth, and LitHub. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains and in Moscow, Idaho. https://leahkhampton.com/