Authors’ Bio
Henry had a forty-year career as a health policy researcher working at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Mathematica Policy Research and published numerous papers in health policy journals. Since his retirement, he has been writing for The Hampshire Review about farming and the natural world and has published stories in several anthologies of Appalachian writers.
Priscilla attended the Pittsburg Institute of Art and FIT in New York. She designed and made stage clothes for country music stars including Loretta Lynn. Under her own label, she sold hand painted scarves and jackets to Nordstrom’s, Henri Bendel, and many high-end boutiques. She left the fashion industry after thirty years to focus on farming and the conservation of heritage breeds. She has written numerous stories for Small Farmer’s Journal.
Since 2001, Henry and Priscilla have lived on a farm in Hampshire County, West Virginia.
What people are saying
“The Keep is honest and compelling storytelling told through the contrasting and complementarity of Priscilla’s and Henry’s individual voices. Priscilla has an intimate view of animal husbandry, while Henry is more prone to philosophizing; yet both are deeply engaged with the land, and both are thoughtful and lively storytellers. Neither shies away from complexities and challenges. In her accounts of raising goats and hogs, Priscilla captures both the necessary brutality and profound tenderness required for successful animal husbandry.”
—Arwen Donahue is the author of the graphic memoir Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year (Hub City, 2022) and the oral history collection This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky, 2022). She lives on a farm in Kentucky.
“A delightful chronicle of a moment in time on a parcel in Appalachia. I enjoyed reading about this couple, their purchase of this land, the way they cared for it, raised a family on it, the hard work of raising goats, other interactions with the natural world and with their neighbors.”
—Gretchen Legler is the author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life (Trinity University Press, 2022); On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (Milkweed Editions, 2005); and All the Powerful Invisible Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook (Milkweed Editions, 1995). She is professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington. Legler holds a PhD in English and feminist studies and a master’s of divinity from Harvard Divinity School.
