Erica Abrams Locklear is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. A Western North Carolina native, she writes about food, Appalachia, and the South. Her first book, Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies, explores the identity conflicts that literacy attainment can cause for mountain women. Her current project, Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People, investigates representations of mountain food from the late nineteenth century to today.