Iris Underwood
Born in Matewan, West Virginia, and raised in Metro Detroit, Iris Lee Underwood is a Michigan award-winning journalist, poet, and author. She’s a past president of Detroit Working Writers (2003-2005), writer in residence for the former Borders Bookstores (1997-2009) and the Troy Public Library, Troy, Michigan (1998-2013). Underwood writes a weekly column for the Tri-City Times, Imlay City, MI.
Her byline also appeared in The MacGuffin, Farming Magazine, Woods & Water, Michigan Gardener, edibleWOW, Michigan History Magazine, and Kentucky and West Virginia newspapers. She self-published Encouraging Words for All Seasons (2001), Growing Lavender & Other Poems (2007), and The Mantle, a novel (2018).
To encourage the craft of poetry, Underwood sponsors the annual Yule Love It Lavender Farm Poetry Contest.
From 2004-2014, Underwood owned and operated Yule Love It Lavender Farm in north Oakland County, Michigan, where she resides with her husband, cats, hens, and honeybees.
Her byline also appeared in The MacGuffin, Farming Magazine, Woods & Water, Michigan Gardener, edibleWOW, Michigan History Magazine, and Kentucky and West Virginia newspapers. She self-published Encouraging Words for All Seasons (2001), Growing Lavender & Other Poems (2007), and The Mantle, a novel (2018).
To encourage the craft of poetry, Underwood sponsors the annual Yule Love It Lavender Farm Poetry Contest.
From 2004-2014, Underwood owned and operated Yule Love It Lavender Farm in north Oakland County, Michigan, where she resides with her husband, cats, hens, and honeybees.
Books
Matewan Garden Club
$4.99 - $30.95
by Iris Underwood
Eighteen-year-old Henry Blankenship dreams of building a house for his childhood sweetheart, Annie Dill, and his mother, Gertie, known by their hill folk as the “woman with a shovel.” Annie dreams of six children and a room of her own to pen the unsung legacies of Appalachian women—yet Annie’s mother, Margaret Dill, President of Matewan Garden Club, has other, bigger plans for her only child. Unwittingly, Russian refugees Natalia Semenov and her son Olaf, Henry’s employers at Hunt’s Feed & Seed, come to Henry and Annie’s rescue.
Matewan Garden Club spans three generations and a multitude of dreams amongst the tight-knit immigrant coal camps and struggling towns along Tug Fork: Williamson, Blackberry City, Red Jacket, Thacker Holler, and countless hollers in between. Like the river’s many tributaries, these communities converge in Depression-era Matewan, West Virginia to build enduring love amid the business of native flora and fauna—seedlings of a post-WWI Europe in chaos, the Bolshevik Revolution—and a brand new America.
Eighteen-year-old Henry Blankenship dreams of building a house for his childhood sweetheart, Annie Dill, and his mother, Gertie, known by their hill folk as the “woman with a shovel.” Annie dreams of six children and a room of her own to pen the unsung legacies of Appalachian women—yet Annie’s mother, Margaret Dill, President of Matewan Garden Club, has other, bigger plans for her only child. Unwittingly, Russian refugees Natalia Semenov and her son Olaf, Henry’s employers at Hunt’s Feed & Seed, come to Henry and Annie’s rescue.
Matewan Garden Club spans three generations and a multitude of dreams amongst the tight-knit immigrant coal camps and struggling towns along Tug Fork: Williamson, Blackberry City, Red Jacket, Thacker Holler, and countless hollers in between. Like the river’s many tributaries, these communities converge in Depression-era Matewan, West Virginia to build enduring love amid the business of native flora and fauna—seedlings of a post-WWI Europe in chaos, the Bolshevik Revolution—and a brand new America.
