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“With her new collection, Miles Away from Nowhere, Chrissie Anderson Peters weaves a coverlet of compassion swaddling the good people of Langston, Virginia. Peters’s tenderness towards her fictional community in the mountains of southwest Virginia is an inspiration to neighbors everywhere, the gentle spirit suffusing her tales a reminder that hope and kindness have not totally gone out of style.”

~ Robert Gipe, author of Trampoline

“In her heartfelt Miles Away from Nowhere, Peters flickers from farm to town to creek, across decades and state lines, through biscuits and births, vultures and heartache. Drunks drink. Librarians tend. Some stay put; some don’t. Every flicker grows into one photograph — of a small town and its people, of a place that insists there is more than meets the eye.”

~ Willie Carver, author of Gay Poems for Red States and Tore All to Pieces

“Chrissie Anderson Peters’s collection of short fiction, Miles Away from Nowhere, depicts small-town life in Southwest Virginia, framed by church pews and high school football, small mountain farms and backroad secrets. In stories that evoke the early work of Appalachian legend Lee Smith, Peters confronts the sharp, enduring stings of racism, the quiet desperation of addiction and aging, and the longstanding consequences of ‘sins of the flesh.’ At the fiercely beating heart of this collection are the women who refuse to be erased. They demand autonomy over their own bodies and their own destinies, even when it means waging wars against overbearing mothers and the rigid expectations of a judgmental town. Miles Away from Nowhere is ultimately a testament to resilience.”

~ Denton Loving, author of Feller

“Chrissie Anderson Peters’ debut collection of linked short stories, Miles Away from Nowhere, transported me to an Appalachian town as real and particular as my own. Her characters feel like friends and neighbors, and Peters makes me care as deeply about their public and private trials as if they were family.”

~ Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water and Stones and Ghosts

“Chrissie Anderson Peters has a big heart, and as her characters fumble through the problems of their lives, she loves them deeply in all their flawed, beautiful peculiarities. Readers will love them, too.”

~ Jim Minick, author of The Intimacy of Spoons

“In Miles Away from Nowhere, Chrissie Anderson Peters transports readers to an awfully special place — Langston, Virginia — and it’s anywhere but nowhere. She’s accomplished again that authentic worldbuilding we’ve come to expect and savor, bringing the stressful and joyful rigors of community and family cultural dynamics to the page for our reading delight.”

~ Larry Thacker, author of Working It Off in Labor County and Labor Days, Labor Nights

“Like many Appalachian writers, Chrissie Anderson Peters writes about home and belonging. She has a gift for transporting you to a specific place and time. Using geographical knowledge of her native Virginia along with pop cultural references, Peters allows us to share space with these characters, whether they are in bed with a calf or struggling with an eating disorder. The town of Langston is itself a character that changes over time and becomes more accepting. I’m glad I read this!”

~ Monic Ductan, author of Daughters of Muscadine

“Chrissie Anderson Peters’ authentic voice captures modern life in Appalachia in all its splendor and complication. The vivid characters inhabiting Miles Away from Nowhere are shaped by their homeplace, embattled with it, pushed away yet always drawn back — determined to make a home where they can be themselves. Josie, Lydia, and the residents of Peters’ Langston, Virginia, live on long after the final page.”

~ Wes Blake, author of Pineville Trace

“In Miles Away from Nowhere, Chrissie Anderson Peters creates a community where everyone knows everyone, everyone has something to say about everyone else, and truth is often buried beneath assumptions and uncharitable judgment. But in fictional Langston, Virginia — a character in its own right — the potential for loyalty, forgiveness, and grace is not totally off the table, even to those wounded hearts living on the outskirts of acceptance. Peters offers us a tender, often funny, and unsentimental collection of intertwined stories where she explores the desire to escape, the complicated pull of home, and the human hunger to belong despite everything. This is a book with a big heart, Bravo for this debut collection!”

~ Darnell Arnoult, author of Galaxie Wagon and Incantations