Hungry Roots by Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre selected as a 2025 North Carolina Reads pick by North Carolina Humanities

November 11, 2024 | by uscpress

North Carolina Humanities selected Hungry Roots by Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre as a North Carolina Reads pick for April 2025. North Carolina Reads is a virtual book club that annually features five books that explore issues of racial, social, and gender equity, and the history and culture of North Carolina.

Depictions of Appalachian food culture and practices often romanticize people in the region as good, simple, and, often, white. These stereotypes are harmful to the actual people they are meant to describe as well as to those they exclude. In Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre tell a more complicated story. The authors embark on a cultural tour through food and drinking establishments to investigate regional resilience in and through the plurality of traditions and communities that form the foodways of Southern Appalachia.

Ashli Quesinberry Stokes is professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wendy Atkins-Sayre is professor and chair of the Department of Communication & Film at the University of Memphis. The two have collaborated on Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South and coedited City Places, Country Spaces: Rhetorical Explorations of the Urban/Rural Divide.

View the full 2025 North Carolina Reads list.