Kevin McIlvoy Pens an Appalachian Ghost Story on Racial Justice in “One Kind Favor”

Podcast: Download (Duration: 44:19 — 40.6MB)

In this episode 216, we visit with Kevin McIlvoy, author of “One Kind Favor,” a haunting and nuanced look at past and present racial injustices in the Appalachian Mountains.

Ghosts haunt the small Appalachian community of Cord, North Carolina. After a lynching is discovered and covered up in the town, the ghosts of Cord begin to unearth the past truths of racism and social injustice to confront the townspeople and get justice for Lincoln Lennox.

Karen E. Bender, a National Book Award finalist and author of “Refund,” had this to say about the book, “Kevin McIlvoy is a writer of incisive moral vision, and One Kind Favor looks at the brutality of racial injustice in a North Carolina town with a powerful sense of place and clarity and insight.”

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About the Author:

Kevin McIlvoy is the author of seven previous books: five novels, a book of short stories, and a collection of prose poetry and flash fictions. A retired Regents Professor of Creative Writing from New Mexico State University, he also taught at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing for 30 years. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Additional Endorsements

“It’s a perpetually disorienting book, but McIlvoy’s approach does establish a certain properly righteous mood: In a town thick with injustice, placid prose and straightforward plotting simply won’t do.”

“Kevin McIlvoy’s gripping One Kind Favor haunted me long after I turned the last page. Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident, the book explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. McIlvoy bravely sets forth a suspenseful story that tackles racial violence, police indifference, and the cost of justice in contemporary American South. This is an important novel I look forward to impacting readers far and wide.”

  • Devi S. Laskar, author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of the APA Award in Literature

“In One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy crafts a novel we haven’t seen before: a rare book about race and place that offers a nuanced take on the world we live in. The concerns are universal, including what it means to witness trauma in our increasingly divided world. The music is uncompromising—you are drawn into the strikingly beautiful, taut, and relentless prose. The novel’s hugeness of heart and fierceness will keep you reading. This book feels vital for our times.”

  • Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians, winner of the PEN Open Book Award

“Cord, the spirit-haunted North Carolinan town of One Kind Favor, is down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, somewhere over the rainbow after the cyclone-lifted house touches down in that other land. It is uncomfortably situated in our ‘tikilit bloody present.’ I describe Cord as “spirit-haunted,” but is any place in America not haunted by ancestral misdeeds? Squint into the mirror McIlvoy provides, but don’t dare look at the grotesqueries and pretend you’re looking into a funhouse mirror. This is what we really look like.”

  • Rion Amilcar Scott, author of The World Doesn’t Require You

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