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Appalachian Heritage Festival celebrates Appalachian culture, launches community partnership program

By Tabitha Johnston - Chronicle Staff | Oct 1, 2021

Shurbutt

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The Appalachian Heritage Festival kicked off this past weekend, with a series of events celebrating Appalachian culture, including storytelling by Adam Booth, music workshops, a musical showcase concert and A Celebration of Appalachian Storytellers, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Dorothy Allison Volume XIII reading.

This year, the festival was planned to take place for the first time on two platforms — both in-person and online. While festival organizers wanted to be able to hold the festival as it had been up until last year, when the COVID-19 Pandemic forced it to go completely online, they realized that offering it through both mediums would be the wisest solution to continuing pandemic concerns. It would also allow for attendance from those outside of the Eastern Panhandle, who could not otherwise attend.

“There have been many things that have been troublesome about COVID, and our lives certainly have changed over the last two years, but one of the good things is that we’ve found a way to reach out across the state and bring in more people than just people in the Eastern Panhandle,” said Appalachian Heritage Writer-In-Residence Project Director and Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities Director Sylvia Shurbutt.

“We did all of these programs last year,” Shurbutt said of the 2020 Appalachian Heritage Writer-In-Residence and Appalachian Heritage Festival. “We actually had our largest crowd with Dorothy Allison, but we did all of the programs to an empty audience — the audience was out in electronic land, so we’re kind of halfway there this time.”

According to Shurbutt, the first Appalachian Heritage Writer-In-Residence was Sharon McCrumb in 1999. Since then, the program and festival have brought the talents of many other notable authors, musicians, storytellers and poets to the area.

“It takes a lot to bring these programs to everyone,” Shurbutt said, mentioning that, since its founding, most of the AHF and AHWIR funding has come from grants.

To secure the Appalachian Heritage programs’ future, along with providing scholarships for students to attend trips led by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities, a new fundraising initiative has been founded, according to Shurbutt.

“We have a new group called Allies for Appalachia. Anytime that you give any amount . . . you will have access to a lot of wonderful benefits, including free access to all of our classes. You can come into our classes at any time,” Shurbutt said. “This is important to us, because the university does not support these programs.

“For the 20 years that we have brought writers like Henry Louis Gates and Charles Frazier and Karen Spears Zacharias here to Shepherd University, we have had to do it through the hustling of writing our books and anthologies, and also through the hustling of writing for grants,” Shurbutt said. “I would like to certainly leave one day a situation at Shepherd University where there is an endowment, and that endowment will take care of the bulk of these programs. Also, we have to have an endowment for scholarships for our students and travel scholarships.”

Those interested in learning more about Allies for Appalachia should visit https://www.shepherd.edu/appalachian/allies-for-appalachia.