Melinda Clayton

Deep in the mountains of Appalachia, Billy May Platte learned the hard way that 1940s West Virginia was no place to be gay....

When 14-year-old foster child Johnathan Thomas Woods is suspected of murder, an old letter and a tacky billboard advertisement lead him to the office of attorney Brian Stone....

On a sweltering July morning in rural Tennessee, 50-year-old Rebecca Reynolds visits the family farm, where she literally stumbles across the mutilated bodies of her parents and younger sister, a sister who had spent life in a wheelchair after a birth fraught with complications. Rebecca's first...

When Anna unexpectedly finds herself pregnant again at the age of 43, Phillip is thrilled to have a second chance at fatherhood in spite of Anna's objections....

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby's twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea...

On the anniversary of her husband's death, 49-year-old Emily Holt runs away, leaving an unmade bed, an unlocked house, two college-aged sons, and an overabundance of bad memories. Struggling to make peace with the death of a husband who'd been lost to mental illness, she vows to drive to the end...

Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood. Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded not only by homemade stills and corn liquor but by an impoverished family that more often...

No one with Jessie's history of childhood trauma could make it through unscathed, and Jessie is no exception. As recounted in Appalachian Justice, Jessie is an adult survivor of horrendous childhood abuse suffered at the hands of her stepfather. At the age of 13, on a stormy night on top of...