About the Alliance
The Appalachian Authors Alliance is a pan-regional home for the literary life of Appalachia — all of it. Authors and poets, independent bookstores and reading-friendly cafés, libraries, illustrators, small presses, and artisans, across the whole Appalachian footprint from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. We are digital-first and directory-first: the point is to make the region's literary community findable, connected, and celebrated.
What we believe
- Celebrate, don't gatekeep. A first-time rural poet and a seasoned novelist get the same porch.
- The whole ecosystem matters. A region's literature lives or dies with its bookstores and libraries, not just its writers.
- Appalachia without stereotype. We welcome Affrilachian voices, Cherokee and Qualla Boundary storytellers, and every holler and river town in between — and we never trade in clichés.
- Honest always. No hype, no invented praise, no hard sell. Trust is the whole asset.
The founder
The Alliance was founded by Tracy Atkins — an author, an award-winning book designer, and a lifelong West Virginian based in Mothman country, where the mountains meet the Ohio River. Tracy wrote and designed the Amazon bestseller Aeternum Ray, co-founded BookDesignTemplates.com (which has helped shape the books of more than 70,000 independent authors since 2013), and built BookDesigner.ai. The Alliance is his home-country project: the same craft, pointed at the region that raised him.
About the name
We're the Appalachian Authors Alliance — pan-regional, digital, and open to the whole creative ecosystem. Our neighbors at the Appalachian Authors Guild do fine in-person work with authors in southwest Virginia; we're a different organization with a different scope, and there's room on the mountain for both.