Pauletta Hansel and Sara Moore Wagner come together to celebrate and interrogate Appalachian girlhood. They will present their poems in a conversation that spans generations, from Pauletta’s coming of age in the coal fields of southeastern Kentucky, as captured in her latest book Heartbreak Tree, to Sara’s juxtaposition of the urban landscape and the hills her parents left for another life in her forthcoming collection Hillbilly Madonna. Their poems, together, present a lineage of the region. They speak through the gaps and the spaces about what it means to be a woman sprouting from this exploited and misunderstood region.