About Jessica

Jessica Cory is the editor of and contributor to the collection Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (West Virginia University Press, 2019) and co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (University of Georgia Press, 2023). A settler scholar, writer, and educator hailing from southeastern Ohio and now living in western North Carolina, she is the Editor of Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, published at Appalachian State University since 1972. Her creative work has appeared in a variety of journals (see Writing) and was a finalist in the 2017 and 2019 Still: The Journal poetry contests.

She holds a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she specialized in Native American, African American, and environmental literatures, and an MA in Creative Writing from East Carolina University, where she studied poetry. Her research interests include ecocriticism, ecopoetics, literature and the environment, environmental justice, Appalachian studies, African American literature, and Indigenous/Native American literature, particularly looking at how these areas intersect.