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Ashley Blooms was born and raised in Cutshin, Kentucky. She received her MFA as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi. Her short stories have appeared in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Oxford American. She's been awarded scholarships from the Clarion Writer's Workshop and Appalachian Writer's Workshop, served as fiction editor for the Yalobusha Review, and worked as an editorial intern and first reader for Tor.com.
She currently lives in rural Kentucky with her partner and dog, where she is at work on a middle grade book.
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How did your experiences as a Kentuckian shape the setting of the book? What do you think people overlook when they think about Appalachia?
I think Appalachia has often been a useful tool and talking point for those in power, which is something Elizabeth Catte talks about far more eloquently than I can in her book What You're Getting Wrong about Appalachia. It's a book I recommend every time someone asks me a question like this. And I think Appalachia still exists as a monolith to many people, which often means they overlook things like the sheer existence of and therefore the contributions of black people and other people of color in Appalachia (take the Affrilachian poets, for example), or the long history of social, economic, and labor activism, or rural queerness, or the fact that Appalachia is an incredibly large place that includes cities and various religions and far more complexity and nuance than it's often depicted with (check out Roger May's photography series Looking at Appalachia to get an idea of the scope of the region). I know all these things to be true about my home. And when I write about it, I try to hold as much as I can in my work, and to write with honesty and conviction and with magic, too.
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