West Virginia author, Denise Giardina, will be at the library on November 12, 2015 from 4 p.m. to discuss her award winning book, “Storming Heaven,” as well as her other works and her writing career.  Giardina will speak for the first hour and will be available to meet individuals during the book signing beginning at 5 p.m.

 

Giardina was born in Bluefield; she lived her early years in a coal company town in neighboring McDowell County and later in Kanawha County, where she graduated from high school.  She is best known as a novelist and also has a long history of community activism which included a run for governor of West Virginia.

 

Giardina received a B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973 and an M. Div. in 1979 from the Virginia Theological Seminary.  She is an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.

 

Her first five novels are all historical fiction.  She depicts Henry V in pre-Renaissance England in “Good King Harry,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1930s-40s Nazi Germany in “Saints and Villains,” and explores the subject of time travel in “Fallam’s Secret.”   Her most successful novels, “Storming Heaven” and “The Unquiet Earth,” feature the hard lives of coal miners in central Appalachia around 1890-1990.

 

Denise Giardina’s honors include the Weatherford Award of the Appalachian Studies Association for “Storming Heaven” and “The Unquiet Earth,” the Lillian Smith Award and an American Book Award for “The Unquiet Earth,” the Fisk Fiction Prize for “Saints and Villains,” and the Lillie Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing.

 

Giardina retired as writer in residence at West Virginia State University and continues to live in Charleston.  Her most recent book, “Emily’s Ghost” is a novel based on the life of Emily Bronte.

 

Her visit to our area is part of a program sponsored by the Bridgeport Public Library, the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library and the Marion County Public Library.  She will be speaking at the Clarksburg Library on November 12 at noon, and on November 13 at noon at the Marion County Public Library.  It is the first in a series of projects by the three libraries to combine resources in future projects to bring name authors to the region.