124 East Todd Street
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Phone 502-330-3707
Victor M. Depta, Publisher
email: victordepta1@gmail.com
Chris Green and Edwina Pendarvis, Co-Editors
Helen Smith, Managing Editor
email: helensmithbmp@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/VictorDepta
Please note that all books purchased through Blair Mountain Press are at
124 East Todd Street
Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
Phone 502-330-3707
Victor M. Depta, Publisher
email: victordepta1@gmail.com
Chris Green and Edwina Pendarvis, Co-Editors
Helen Smith, Managing Editor
email: helensmithbmp@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/VictorDepta
Please note that all books purchased through Blair Mountain Press are at the discounted price of $10.00 each. Add $2.50 for handling/shipping. To order directly through our site, scroll down this page to "Contact Us," and enter your order via email. We will reply directly.
Our books are also available at amazon.com. Just type in the Author and Title on the Amazon Page.
In 1999, a small group of Appalachian writers decided to establish a press with the aim of publishing their work as it relates to the region and to the environment. After nineteen years, twenty-one volumes have been completed, which is impressive, considering the Press's limited means.
The name of the press comes from a mountain in southern West Virginia. Blair is the divide between two watersheds, westward into Logan County and the Guyandotte River and eastward into Boone County and the Little Coal River. On its slopes in 1921, 10,000 coal miners battled 3000 state police, deputies, mine guards and Federal troops in a war over unionization of the miners.
In 1972 on Buffalo Creek, a few miles from Blair, 125 people were drowned and 4000 left homeless when two slurry dams collapsed and flooded the hollow with black, viscous water.
Blair Mountain is now being threatened with mountaintop removal coal mining. Additionally, due to the efforts of Massey Energy (Alpha Natural Resources), Arch Coal and Natural Resource Partners, the state of West Virginia has asked the National Park Service to remove Blair Mountain from its Register of Historic Places. Please go to the Sierra Club Site for information on the mountain's destruction. Please support the efforts to prevent further decimation of the environment.
2024-2025
The Thought of Emptiness: Outlines for the Mystical
by Victor M. Depta
2024 ISBN 978-0-9861789-7-9
The Creek: Poetry
by Victor M. Depta
1973 (reprint)
ISBN 978-0-9861789-8-6
The Adventures of Jake: A Coal Camp Boy
by Victor M. Depta
2023 ISBN 978-0-9861789-6-2
Eternity Is That
by Victor M. Depta
2021 ISBN 978-0-9861789-5-5
What They Yearn For
2024-2025
The Thought of Emptiness: Outlines for the Mystical
by Victor M. Depta
2024 ISBN 978-0-9861789-7-9
The Creek: Poetry
by Victor M. Depta
1973 (reprint)
ISBN 978-0-9861789-8-6
The Adventures of Jake: A Coal Camp Boy
by Victor M. Depta
2023 ISBN 978-0-9861789-6-2
Eternity Is That
by Victor M. Depta
2021 ISBN 978-0-9861789-5-5
What They Yearn For, Volume 2
by Victor M. Depta
2021 ISBN 978-0-9861789-4-8
What They Yearn For
by Victor M. Depta
2019 ISBN 978-0-9861789-3-1
The Strawberry Moon
by Victor M. Depta
2017 ISBN 978-0-9861789-1-7
Letters to Buddha
by Victor M. Depta
2015 ISBN 978-0-9768817-9-7
Ghost Dance Poems
by Edwina Pendarvis
2015 ISBN 978-0-9861789-0-0
Poems: What Love Is
by Victor Marshall Depta
2013 ISBN 978-0-9768817-8-0
Twofold Consciousness: Poetry and Essays on Mysticism
by Victor Marshall Depta
2012 ISBN 978-0-9768817-7-3
Brother and Sister: A Memoir
by Victor M. Depta
2011 ISBN 978-0-9768817-6-6
The Dancing Dragon Poems
by Victor M. Depta
2010 ISBN 978-0-9768817-5-9
Raft Tide and Railroad
by Edwina Pendarvis
2008 ISBN 978-0-9768817-4-2
House of the Moon
by Vasek Drobny
2008 ISBN 978-0-9768817-3-5
An Afterthought of Light
by Victor Depta
2007 ISBN 978-0-9768817-2-8
Coal: A Poetry Anthology
Chris Green, Editor
2006 ISBN 0-8768817-1-3
The Simultaneous Mountain: Essays on Poetry and Mysticism
by Victor Depta
2005 ISBN 0-9768817-0-5
The Little Henry Poems
by Victor Depta
2005 ISBN 0-9666609-9-7
A West Virginia Trilogy
by Victor Depta
2004 ISBN 0-9666608-8-9
Like the Mountains of China
by Edwina Pendarvis
2003 ISBN 0-9666608-7-0
Mountains and Clouds: Four Comedies
by Victor Depta
2003 ISBN 0-9666608-6-2
Azrael on the Mountain
by Victor Depta
2002 ISBN 978-0-9666608-5-2
Preparing a Room
by Victor Depta
2001 ISBN 0-9666608-4-6
Plays from Blair Mountain: Four Comedies
by Victor Depta
2000 ISBN 0-9666608-3-8
The Silence of Blackberries
by Victor Depta
1999 ISBN 0-9666608-0-3
In Praise of Motels
by Pamela Steed Hill
1999 ISBN 0-9666608-1-1
The Helen Poems
by Victor Depta
Ion Books 1994 ISBN 0-938507-22-2
A Doorkeeper in the House
by Victor Depta
Ion Books 1993 ISBN 0-938507-21-4
The House
by Victor Depta
New Rivers Press 1978 ISBN 0-912284-93-5
The Creek
by Victor Depta
Ohio University Press 1973
ISBN 8214-0121-1
© Victor Depta 2018
Blair Mountain Press
ISBN 978-0-9768817-1-1
"This is an important, beautiful book, and I can't imagine how American literature has gone so long without it.”
Silas House
"This collection of poems promises to inspire thought and conversation about the complicated relationship between coal, society, and culture."
Dr. Shaunna Scott
"Although coal is dirty and ugly, this anthology is quite the opposite because it illuminates the way that the human spirit has emerged triumphant in the face of the degradation of the land and people."
George Brosi
"As soon as I read the first poems, I felt the power of the words coming from the heart of the nation."
Gurney Norman
"From heartbreaking laments to indelible character sketches and inevitably to the powerful shouts of resistance that have so defined mining culture, these poems tell stories at once ancient and terribly up-to-date about the price of ‘progress' and the cost of labor. "
Rachel Rubin
"Anyone who loves the poetry of place will find old friends and new in these pages, and will find as well the great Appalachian poets of the past resurrected."
Denise Giardina
"The poems in this collection are true-all of them. They come to us from the deep hollows and coal towns and rivers and the front porches and pool halls and coal mines in authentic and lyrical voices that will not go away."
Jack Spadaro
"The combination of work, lost land, pride, and suffering is at the core of the contradictions that animate the region's culture and the poems in this anthology."
Chris Green