Beth Howard is the Appalachia Peoples Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. Originally from Eastern Kentucky, she has organized throughout the South for two decades. She currently lives in Lexington, KY.

A Publisher's Marketplace 2026 Buzz Books Selection

"At a time when analysis is everywhere, and actual strategy is critically needed but hard to come by, Beth Howard's book gives us a road map to building the cross race, class solidarity we need to battle the rising authoritarianism of our times. In the best tradition of working class story telling, and with beauty, pain and inspiration, she takes us on her journey as a coal miners daughter, and her emergence as an effective, passionate organizer among her Appalachian Kentucky people. This book will make you cry, laugh, think, and feel. But most of all, it will leave you hopeful."
--Angela Y. Davis

"Political organizer Howard connects her Appalachian upbringing to her career in social justice, in this deeply felt debut....While Howard's empathetic account stands in welcome contrast to caricatures of Appalachian life, of particular note is her unwillingness to let the gender and racial disparities endemic to the region slide. The result is a refreshing, clear-eyed chronicle of a political awakening."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Song for a Hard Hit People is as heart-rending as it is inspiring. Writing from a place of love, grace, and conviction, Beth Howard recognizes the struggles and dignity of white working people without losing sight of the racism and patriarchy that remain the chief obstacles to freeing us from the rapaciousness of capitalism. And yet, the book's most profound lesson is this: organizing for a better world saves lives--even the life of the organizer."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Race Rebels, Hammer and Hoe

"A colorful and highly personal account of how the trials of a hardscrabble life shaped one woman's devotion to activism."
--Kirkus

"Song for a Hard-Hit People...weaves important lessons into the narrative, including gripping sections that address high rates of drug and alcohol use, interpersonal violence, and the workplace exploitation that is endemic throughout Appalachia.... She also writes movingly about her dad, a former coal miner and a lover of books and music who died as a result of addiction and inadequate medical care. Howard's account is riveting and honest, and her love for her father--along with her hatred of the abuse he subjected her, her brother, and her mother to before getting sober--is a case study in navigating difficult, fraught relationships." --The Progressive

"Beth Howard is a genius writer with a voice that is as down to earth as it is insightful. Song for a Hard-Hit People is about class, racial justice, addiction, and the rural-urban divide. A memoir told with complexity and nuance, it is a balm. Like Howard and her band of top-shelf organizers who knock on doors and listen without judgment, this book is full of hard-won, useful lessons about how to collectively move forward in these brittle times."
--Beth Macy, author of Paper Girl and Dopesick

"In Song for a Hard-Hit People, Beth Howard tells her story about growing up in Appalachian Kentucky and the economic struggles, trauma, and ever-present sexism that existed in her close-knit rural community. Howard calls upon the long history of cross-racial, worker-led solidarity movements to highlight the ways in which we can come together to fight for dignity and a better life for all if we organize."
--Michael Welch, Editor-In-Chief, Chicago Review of Books, Most Anticipated Books of 2026

"Beth Howard has gifted us with a brilliant memoir of growing up and organizing in Appalachia, an important antidote to JD Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which he demonizes his Appalachian family and people. On the contrary, author Howard provides the horrors of capitalism, that sucks the life out of families and workers, then blames them for the dire conditions they are left to deal with. Howard respects and organizes rather than blaming the victim."
--Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, historian and author

"If working class solidarity is the only way forward in this moment--and I absolutely believe that it is--then Beth Howard's Song for a Hard-Hit People is a requisite read for us all. Howard's journey from rural Appalachian childhood to organizer of Rednecks for Black Lives in adulthood shows us that class solidarity isn't just a thing with feathers. It is decidedly possible, and there is nowhere more likely for it to be sparked than in the hills of Appalachia."
--Neema Avashia, Author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place

"In Song For A Hard-Hit People, Beth Howard's lucid, lyrical prose matches the clarity of her thinking about what ails us in this country and what to do about it. She brings to bear considerable descriptive power in weaving personal narrative with the history and future of community organizing in the Southern mountains and beyond. Her graceful writing is at once accessible and sophisticated, sure-footed and daring."
--Robert Gipe, author of Trampoline, Weedeater, and Pop

"Song for a Hard-Hit People is a deeply personal and authentically political memoir. Beth navigates the complicated and challenging moments of her life to grasp the historical realities and to draw the political lessons of the multiracial and multinational working class of Appalachia and their critical relationship with the South - lifting up white supremacy as a key ideology and tool for ruling class division and control. The history of working-class struggle and the Battle of Blair Mountain, in particular, help shape her working-class consciousness and work as an organizer in Appalachia and the South. Joining SURJ (Standing Up for Racial Justice) as an organizer in early 2020, she is tasked with organizing poor white rural folks. The police murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and of Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020 reaffirm Beth's understanding of white supremacy and her political practice. Out of these many struggles comes the slogan "Rednecks for Black Lives" to organize and win over white workers to the necessity of working-class unity. Central to Beth's journey is the intensity of her life, her persistence and resilience. The recurring theme of grounded optimism comes through as a powerful lesson for today's working-class struggle. For these reasons and many more, this memoir is a must read."
--Jerome Scott, co-author of Motown and The Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries: The Story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers

"Provocative, tactical, and at times heartbreaking, Song for a Hard-Hit People is raw and inviting. Like any good Appalachian story, it braids her personal memory and experience--all of which readers of Appalachia and across the South will relate to--with our collective history, stitching the lessons of the West Virginia Mine Wars to the present moment to show us where our anger and energy truly belong, and how and where to channel them. This book is a reminder that real power has always come from people banded together across race, gender, age, sexuality, and political party, organizing around class instead of the lines drawn that keep us divided. Writing as a coal miner's daughter, she names what has long been understood in the hills and hollers here: "there's them that work, and there's them that don't."
--Kenzie New Walker, Executive Director at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum

"Part captivating memoir, part guidebook for the impossible political moment in which we find ourselves, Song for a Hard-Hit People is fiercely tender and exquisitely devastating, a book like no other. This story is for anyone who misses having hope, anyone who wants to believe in and bring about a better world, anyone who doesn't know where to start or how to keep going."
--Shawna Kay Rodenberg, author of Kin

"At once intimate and expansive, Song for a Hard-Hit People shows us how solidarity is formed through the act of listening, organizing, and showing up again and again. Beth Howard writes with clarity and tenderness about growing up in Appalachia, reckoning with grief, addiction, gendered violence, and economic abandonment while insisting that working-class people are not problems to be explained but partners to build power with. Politically smart and emotionally generous, it belongs among the most essential works of collective struggle as a book written from within the fight."
--Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

"A beautiful, generous invitation into the hard-won lessons and insights of a working class Appalachian organizer. Song for a Hard-Hit People is a must read for anyone outside these mountains searching for a more nuanced understanding of a region that's long been flattened by national media. And for those of us living in and fighting for a brighter future in Appalachia, this book is a celebration of the long legacy of multiracial working class resistance in our mountains and an organizing roadmap for the struggles ahead."
--Rae Garringer, author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter

"Beth Howard's sparkling debut, Song for a Hard-Hit People is a revolutionary love letter from the heart of working class Appalachia. By sharing deeply personal stories from her childhood in Eastern Kentucky coal country and her experiences as a fledgeling community organizer, Howard challenges readers to envision a world in which things aren't this hard for the people she loves so fiercely, and to identify the white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist system that's really to blame. As a coal miner's daughter, Howard has always known which side she's on--but like so many of us, it took a lot of hard work to figure out what to do about it. In this organizing manual cleverly disguised as a memoir, Howard shows us what the work looks like from the inside. Here, she draws upon her decades of experience fighting for poor and working people across Appalachia and the South to craft a narrative of collective struggle, hope, and determination, and encourages the rest of us to join her. As she asks, "what's holding you back?"
--Kim Kelly, author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor