Join activist and author Beth Howard in conversation with Mandy Shunnarah in-store on Friday, August 14 at 6:30pm! They'll be discussing Beth's debut book, Song for a Hard-Hit People.
Song for a Hard-Hit People is an Appalachian organizer’s excavation of the past, her own and her people’s, to spark a collective fight for a future where we all have what we need and deserve.
Beth Howard is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the American South for two decades, primarily in her beloved home state of Kentucky.
Beth has been a lead organizer on campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She's also engaged white working-class Southerners on successful electoral campaigns, including ones that defeated an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and reelected Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2023—and ran a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election.
Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives, and has been featured on the NBC News National Day of Racial Healing special, Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, in the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the New York Times, and The Boston Globe. Beth lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Song for a Hard-Hit People is her first book. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.
Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian-American author who now calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, was published in 2024 by Belt Publishing. Their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, was published by Diode Editions in 2025.