Prologue Bookshop is proud to present Stacy Jane Grover for an in-store conversation with Jamie Lyn Smith about her first book, Tar Hollow Trans.

This event will take place on June 21st at 6:30pm in the bookstore. A book signing will occur after the conversation. RSVP to the event with the Eventbrite link below.

Stacy Jane Grover is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati and holds an MA in women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Tar Hollow Trans: Essays is her first book.

In Tar Hollow Trans, Grover explores her transgender experience through common Appalachian cultural traditions. In "Dead Furrows," a death vigil and funeral leads to an investigation of Appalachian funerary rituals and their failure to help Grover cope with the grief of being denied her transness. "Homeplace" threads family interactions with farm animals and Grover's coming out journey, illuminating the disturbing parallels between the American Veterinary Association's guidelines for ethical euthanasia and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's guidelines for transgender care.

Together, her essays write transgender experience into broader cultural narratives beyond transition and interrogate the failures of concepts such as memory, metaphor, heritage, and tradition. Tar Hollow Trans investigates the ways the labels of transgender and Appalachian have been created and understood and reckons with the ways the ever-becoming transgender self, like a stigmatized region, can find new spaces of growth.

Buy the book here.