Visiting author and WVU alum Jeff Mann (left) was introduced by long-time friend and WVU professor Kevin Oderman (right)

Jeff Mann was born in Appalachia and means to die in Appalachia. Most gay literature depicts a “Big Gay life in a Big Gay city,” but Mann’s life’s work shows a different world: From Hinton, West Virginia, he was a young, gay man who stayed rather than leaving for an easier place. Those experiences are at the heart of his poems, essays, and fiction.

When he was seventeen, Mann came to WVU to study English and forestry, and today he teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech. Mann’s reading on October 7—held in the Gluck Theatre in the Mountainlair and presented by the WVU Office of Multicultural Programs in partnership with WVU Spectrum was filled with stories of his time in Morgantown as well as histories of Appalachia.

Mann read from his 2015 poem collection, Rebels, in which he overlaps Civil War history and locations with his own life and history. One of his poems features a bakery in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, housed in a building that once served as part of the hospital where soldiers from the Battle of Antietam were cared for. Mann’s poem poignantly invokes the past and present, imagining the largely repressed history of gay men during that era in a space that now makes delicious donuts.

And because he was back in Morgantown, Mann read “715 Willey Street”—which recounts his experience in Morgantown in 1977 as a gay undergrad—from his 2010 essay collection, Binding the God. In the essay he dances with friends and roommates (and a chicken they were preparing to roast). Mann told the audience that what he misses most about his young, gay days is the dancing: Now, he dances in his basement to Melissa Etheridge while lifting weights.