Author Denise Giardina to speak at UVa-Wise Nov. 14

Celebrated Appalachian author Denise Giardina will discuss her book “Storming Heaven” during a visit to The University of Virginia’s College at Wise on Tuesday, Nov. 14. The event, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. in Fred B. Greear Gymnasium.

All first-year UVa-Wise students were required to read Giardina’s “Storming Heaven” as part of their English composition classes.

An award-winning novelist, Giardina is the author of five novels: “Good King Harry” (1984), “Storming Heaven” (1987), “The Unquiet Earth” (1992), “Saints and Villains” (1998) and “Fallam's Secret” (2003). “Storming Heaven” won the 1987 W. D. Weatherford Award, and its sequel, “The Unquiet Earth,” won the Lillian Smith Award and an American Book Award. “Saints and Villains” was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award.

Giardina was born in the coal mining camp of Black Wolf, in McDowell County, West Virginia.  Most of the men in her family worked for the mining companies, her grandfather, an Italian immigrant from Sicily, and uncles working underground and her father serving as a bookkeeper for Page Coal and Coke Company.  Though Giardina received a bachelor’s degree from West Virginia Wesleyan College and a master’s degree in divinity from the Virginia Theological Seminary, she has chosen to express her concern for the people and land of her native West Virginia as a writer rather than as a minister.

Giardina's op-ed pieces have appeared in “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post,” and her experiences in the 1989 Pittston Coal Strike appeared in “The Nation,” “Southern Exposure,” and “The Village Voice.”  Giardina also has written a screenplay, “The Gift Horse,” filmed by West Virginia Public Television in 1996.  She has received Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988 and 1996), and she was writer-in-residence at Hollins College in 1991 and Shepherd University in 2002.

Giardina currently lives in Charleston, W.Va., and teaches at West Virginia State College.

Posted November 7, 2006