Jeff Biggers

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Jeff Biggers (born in 1963) is an American writer, editor, journalist, and critic. He is the author of two books: The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America and In the Sierra Madre. He has worked as a writer, educator and community organizer across the United States, Europe, India and Mexico. His award-winning stories have appeared on NPR, PRI, and in scores of travel, literary and music magazines, and national and foreign newspapers, and various anthologies. He has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and for Pacific News Service national syndication. His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Field Foundation Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award. He serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center. In the 1990s, as part of his work to develop literacy and literary programs in rural, reservation and neglected communities in the American Southwest, he founded the Northern Arizona Book Festival. In the 1980s, Biggers served as an assistant to former Senator George McGovern in Washington, DC, and as a personal aide to Rev. William Sloane Coffin at the Riverside Church in New York City. Born in Ohio, raised in Illinois and Arizona, he earned a B.A. in History and English at Hunter College in New York City. He also studied at the University of California in Berkeley, Columbia University and the University of Arizona.

[edit] Writings

The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment was praised by the Citizen-Times as a "masterpiece of popular history...revelations abound." The US of Appalachia argues that beyond its mythology in the American imagination, Appalachia has long been a vanguard region in the United States-—a cradle of U.S. freedom and independence, and a hot bed for literature and music. Some of the most quintessential and daring American innovations, rebellions, and social movements have emerged from an area often stereotyped as a quaint backwater. In the process, immigrants from the Appalachian diaspora have become some of our nation's most famous leaders.

∑ Appalachians formed the first District of Washington as a defiant outpost outside of British control

∑ Southern mountain insurgents orchestrated their own attacks on British-led troops, turning the tide of the American Revolution in the South

∑ From an Appalachian hamlet in North Carolina came Nina Simone, who went on to become an international diva with her blend of folk, jazz, and Bach-motif riffs

∑ Adolph Ochs, a young publisher from Chattanooga, took over the New York Times and set its course for world acclaim

∑ Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, one of the 20th century's most important labor leaders, drew from a long-time activist family in West Virginia

∑The first antislavery newspaper in America was founded in Tennessee, and Appalachians trained New England's legendary abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison

∑ Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was recognized for her memoirs of West Virginia as much as for her literary contributions to the Far East

∑ Appalachia produced America's first woman muckraker Anne Royall, pioneering social realism author Rebecca Harding Davis, and literary innovators Martin Delany, Willa Cather, Thomas Wolfe, James Still, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, among many others

∑ Sequoyah, a Cherokee mountaineer, invented the first syllabary in modern times

∑ Blues icons, Bessie Smith and WC Handy, emerged from Appalachia's rich African American musical traditions

∑ Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee galvanized the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movement

According to Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Brave Enemies, “Jeff Biggers opens a new window on the complex history of the region called Appalachia. He takes a hard but affectionate look at both the myths and the facts, and what he finds is by turns sobering and thrilling. Drawing on the contradictions, layers, and range of what is known as mountain culture, he shows that nothing is quite what it seems, and that to understand American history it is essential to know Appalachian history. Biggers tells his story with verve and vivid detail, a story that will at once provoke and inspire.”

According to Studs Terkel, “The shameless caricatures—‘hillbilly’ and ‘redneck’—have in popular thought defined the people of Appalachia, in the mountains of the Cumberlands. If ever there were a folk most enlightened in the world of haves and have-nots, exercising their first amendment rights with more guts than our ‘respectable media,’ it is the heroic survivors in the hills and hollows. Among those that have long gone were Joe and Gaynell Begley, who ran a general store in a Kentucky ghost town made so by strip miners and corporate lawyers, and Myles Horton, one of our great educators, whose Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee taught students, black and white, among whom were Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They learned at Highlander where the body was buried and who was doing what to whom. There have been so many others, including Nina Simone, the black singer, and Florence Reece, a miner’s daughter who wrote, ‘Which Side Are You On?’ Jeff Biggers’s inspiring book should be a best seller immediately. It is a ‘how-to’ book—how to assert your fundamental rights and how to speak out in the manner of t he American Revolution footsloggers, whose descendants they are. Read it and your faltering hopes will rise.”

In the Sierra Madre was praised by Booklist as "an astonishing sojourn." "Full of historical insights," wrote the San Antonio Express-News, "and unforgettable characters." The travel memoir/history is a groundbreaking and extraordinary memoir that chronicles the astonishing history of one of the most famous, yet unknown, regions in the world. Based on his one-year sojourn among the Raramuri/Tarahumara, award---winning journalist Jeff Biggers offers a rare look into the ways of the most resilient indigenous culture in the Americas, the exploits of the Mexican mountaineers, and the fascinating parade of argonauts and accidental travelers that has journeyed into the Sierra Madre over centuries. From African explorers, Bohemian friars, Confederate and Irish war deserters, French poets, Boer and Russian commandos, hidden Apache and Mennonite communities, bewildered archaeologists, addled writers, and legendary characters like Antonin Artaud, B. Traven, Sergei Eisenstein, George Patton, Geronimo and Pancho Villa, Biggers uncovers the remarkable treasures of the Sierra Madre (Mexico's Copper Canyon).

According to Luis Urrea, author of the Hummingbird's Daughter, “Jeff Biggers has the keenest eye in the business, and he has a fine, luminous voice to tell you what he has seen. This is a welcome addition to western and Mexican letters. Biggers manages to write like a poet, a historian, a naturalist and an adventurer. His pages are burnished and alive, and I admire his work. You need to read this one soon.”

[edit] Bibliography

Biggers, Jeff, (2007), The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. ISBN ISBN-10: 1593761511 ISBN-13: 978-1593761516

Biggers, Jeff (2006), In the Sierra Madre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252031016

Biggers, Jeff, (2006), The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture and Enlightenment to America. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard. ISBN-10: 1593760310 ISBN-13: 978-1593760311

Biggers, Jeff, Brosi, George and West, Don (2004), No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems by Don West. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252071573