Visiting Authors

Crystal Wilkinson

One of the core members of the Affrilachian Poets group (http://www.affrilachianpoets.com/), Crystal Wilkinson is best known for her two short story collections, Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street. Her writing challenges misguided notions of an homogeneously white Appalachia, and hearing from Ms. Wilkinson at such an early date in the institute will be important in helping illustrate the diversity of the region. Water Street examines the secret lives of neighbors and friends who live on Water Street in a small town in Kentucky. Love and truth and tragedy are revealed under Wilkinson’s sure hand. The Washington Post has said of Water Street, “This is a superb, cohesive work which marks Ms. Wilkinson’s evolution as a gifted observer and writer.”

For more: http://www.crystalwilkinson.com/
http://www.tobypress.com/books/water_street.htm

Ron Rash

Ron Rash, poet, short story writer and novelist, is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. His novel Serena is centered on newly married George and Serena Pemberton, owners of a logging company in the mountains of North Carolina. Their operation is aimed strictly at maximizing profits, with no regard for either the safety of their workers or the future of the land they’re pillaging. The tragic result of environmental disregard looms large in all of Rash’s fiction, and in Serena, the Pembertons leave behind a “wasteland of stumps and slash and creeks awash with dead trout.”

For more: http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/33503/Ron_Rash/index.aspx

Denise Giardina

Denise Giardina, a native of West Virginia, is a prize winning fiction writer. Her book Storming Heaven was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award for the best published work about the Appalachian South. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction.
Giardina’s Storming Heaven takes place in the coalfields along the West Virginia - Kentucky border during the “West Virginia Mine Wars”. It covers the period 1890-1921, when coal miners were fighting to be unionized. The climax of the novel is based upon the historical 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain between U.S. Army troops and a resisting fledgling union organization. The mining camp Denise Giardina spent her childhood in was less than 100 miles from Blair Mountain and served as the model for the town of Winco in the novel.

Denise Giardina’s 1992 work, The Unquiet Earth, also explores life in the coalfields of West Virginia from the 1930s into the 1990s. As with Storming Heaven, the novel is written from the first hand perspective of several narrators, enabling readers to clearly understand the characters’ views of the United Mine Workers of America and the hope that it is believed to bring. Denise Giardina incorporates a diversity of portraits, not only of coal miners, but also of coal operators, politicians (local and national), and VISTA workers into her works. The novel also chronicles the continual lack of concern for human life by the coal mine operators. This includes such important issues as Black Lung and culminates in a catastrophic flood at the novel’s end, the author’s fictionalization of the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster.

For more: http://www.denisegiardina.com