My Kentucky Moonlight School

“Jewel, the moon’s rising!” Mamaw calls to me. “Time for us Moonlighters to go.”

Up and down pine-needle trails, through tree-thick woods, and across crooked creeks, Jewel and her grandparents and dozens of people young and old make their way to class. But this school is for grown-ups, held only on evenings when the moon is bright enough for the students to walk safely, and tonight is the most important night. Jewel has been helping her Mamaw and Papaw with their studies, but worries: Has she done enough to get them graduated?

Inspired by the life of Cora Wilson Stewart, whose Moonlight Schools became the model for the first adult literacy programs in the United States, and penned by acclaimed best-selling novelist Kim Michele Richardson, this beguiling and luminous book imagines lives lived among the beautiful hills and hollers of Appalachia and transformed by the power of reading and writing.