WHEELING — In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Marc Harshman’s appointment as the Poet Laureate of West Virginia, Monongahela Books is excited to announce the publication of this new collection of 17 poems lavishly illustrated with period engravings.

The gathering includes a few poems from very early in Harshman’s career, as well as poems never before published in book form.

As the publisher’s blurb notes: “Every poem in the ‘Dark Hills of Home’ has its birth among the foothills and hollows of the western Alleghenies, between the Ohio and Monongahela rivers in the heart of Appalachia — where the sun rises late and sets early, and the night is never entirely absent.”

Other recent titles by Harshman include “Woman in Red Anorak” (Lynx House/University of Washington Press) which won the Blue Lynx Prize. His 14th children’s book, “Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece”(co-authored by Anna Smucker) was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan and named an Amazon Book of the Month. A stunning chaplet featuring two poems from Harshman’s visits to Oxford, England titled “Two Views of Oxford” was published earlier this year, also by Monongahela Books.

Other recent accolades include being named co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and his invitation to deliver the opening address for this year’s Appalachian Studies Association conference held in Morgantown this spring. His poem, “Dispatch from the Mountain State,” was printed in the 2020 Thanksgiving edition of the New York Times as part of feature on poets’ responses to COVID pandemic.

Harshman was appointed as the seventh Poet Laureate of West Virginia by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin in May of 2012, succeeding Irene McKinney who passed away earlier that year. He and his wife, Cheryl, have called the northern panhandle of West Virginia home for over 40 years with the past 25 being resident in Wheeling.

His latest books can be purchased online at monongahelabooks.com.