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Image Credit: Colson Whitehead © Chris Close

Author Bio:
Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Underground Railroad (an Oprah’s Book Club selection and winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize), The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He was named New York’s 11th State Author in 2018. His most recent book, New York Times bestseller The Nickel Boys, was published in May 2019 and was one of TIME Magazine’s ten best fiction books of the decade, winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Colson Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in a number of publications, such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper’s and Granta.

He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for John Henry Days.

He has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming. He lives in New York City.

For more information on this speaker, please visit www.prhspeakers.com.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Image Credit: Photo by Marty Umans

Scieszka is best known for his bestselling picture books including The True Story of the Three Little Pigs! and The Stinky Cheese Man. He is also the founder of www.guysread.com and a champion force behind www.guyslisten.com. He was also the first U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2008.

Author Bio from www.jsworldwide.com

Jon Scieszka was born in Flint, Michigan on September 8, 1954. It was a Wednesday. Right around lunchtime. He is the second-oldest, and nicest, of six Scieszka boys. No girls. His mother, Shirley, worked as a registered nurse. His dad, Louis, was an elementary school principal at Freeman Elementary. His dad's parents, Michael and Anna, came to America from Poland. "Scieszka" is a word in Polish. It means "path."

Jon went to Culver Military Academy for high school. He had some spectacular teachers there, and became Lieutenant Scieszka. Jon thought about being a doctor and studied both Science and English at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. He graduated in 1976, lived in Detroit, then moved to Brooklyn, NY to write instead. He earned his MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in New York in 1980, then painted apartments.

Not knowing what he was getting into, Jon applied for a teaching job at an elementary school called The Day School in New York City. He started as a 1st grade Assistant Teacher, graduated to teaching 2nd grade, taught 3rd and 4th grade Math, 5th grade History, and then some 6th, 7th and 8th grade.

Teaching school, Jon re-discovered how smart kids are, and found the best audience for the weird and funny stories he had always liked to read and write. He took a year off from teaching to write stories for kids. He sent these stories around to many publishers, and got rejected by all of them. He kept painting apartments and writing stories.

Through his wife Jeri, who was working in NY as a magazine art director, he met a funny guy named Lane Smith. Lane was painting illustrations for magazine articles, and working on his first children's book. Jon gave Lane his story: A. Wolf's Tale. Lane loved it. Lane drew a few illustrations for the story and took it to show many publishers. He got rejected by all of them. "Too dark," they said. "Too sophisticated," they said. "Don't ever come back here, okay?" they said.

Jon and Lane liked A. Wolf's Tale. They kept showing it around. They kept getting rejected. Finally, Regina Hayes, an editor at Viking Books said she thought the story and the illustrations were funny. She said she would publish the book. And she did, in 1989, with the title changed to: The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!.

Pigs! has now sold over 3 million copies and has been translated into 14 different languages. Over the last 19 years, Jon and Lane have worked together on 8 picture books and 8 Time Warps. Lane's wife Molly Leach has designed all of their picture books.

Jon's books have won a whole mess of awards, and sold over 11 million copies all around the world.

Jon is now working on a giant pre-school publishing program called Trucktown. It's a world where all of the characters are trucks. And all of the trucks act like real preschoolers - loud and crazy and wild and funny.

Jon still lives in Brooklyn with his wife Jeri. They have two children: a daughter Casey, and son Jake.

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Author Bio:
Josh Malerman is the mastermind behind the 2018 hit Netflix thriller, Bird Box. He is an author of short stories and novels, and he is also the singer/songwriter of the Detroit rock band The High Strung.

While on tour with his band, Josh wrote novels in the passenger seat between cities. Bird Box wasn’t the first novel he wrote, but it was the first one published; it was published in 2014 to much critical acclaim. Author Hugh Howey calls Bird Box, “A book that demands to be read,” and Kirkus Reviews writes, “Malerman ... keeps us tinglingly on edge with his cool, merciless storytelling [and] douses his tale in poetic gloom ... an unsettling thriller.” In 2018, Netflix released a film adaptation of Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, and Trevante Rhodes.

Josh’s latest book, Malorie, is the stunning sequel to Bird Box and was released in 2020. Other Malerman novels include Black Mad Wheel, Unbury Carol, Goblin, and Inspection. Josh’s writing has been compared to that of Stephen King and Jonathan Carroll, but with a voice uniquely his own. His books have been nominated for the Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the James Herbert Award.

Josh lives in Michigan with his fiancé, artist/musician, Allison Laakko. Aside from writing, he is currently working on a new album with his band.

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Author Bio:

Eric Eyre is an investigative reporter at Mountain State Spotlight, a nonprofit news outlet, and is a former statehouse reporter for the Charleston Gazette-Mail newspaper. In 2017, his investigation into massive shipments of opioids to West Virginia’s southern coalfields was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Eyre is the author of the national-bestselling Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic. New York Times book critic Dwight Garner named Death in Mud Lick one of the “10 best books of 2020.” The book also is one of five finalists for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for true-crime writing.

Eyre lives in Charleston, West Virginia, with his wife and son.

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Author Bio:

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia. She is the author of six novels: Good King Harry, Storming Heaven, The Unquiet Earth, Saints and Villains, Fallam’s Secret, and Emily’s Ghost. Her journalism has appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Giardina is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Boston Book Review’s Fisk Fiction Prize. She is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College and Virginia Theological Seminary and is a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Heeding the Call by William Jolliff is a literary analysis of Giardina's novels and will be published in May by West Virginia University Press.

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Author Bio:

Bio from homerhickam.com:

"Homer H. Hickam, Jr. was born on February 19, 1943, the second son of Homer and Elsie Hickam, and was raised in Coalwood, West Virginia. He graduated from Big Creek High School in 1960 and from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in 1964 with a BS degree in Industrial Engineering. A U.S. Army veteran, Mr. Hickam served as a First Lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1967-1968 where he won the Army Commendation and Bronze Star medals. He served six years on active duty, leaving the service with the rank of Captain.

Hickam has been a writer since 1969 after his return from Vietnam. At first, he mostly wrote about his scuba diving adventures for a variety of different magazines. Then, after diving on many of the wrecks involved, he branched off into writing about the battle against the U-boats along the American east coast during World War II. This resulted in his first book, Torpedo Junction (1989), a military history best-seller published in 1989 by the Naval Institute Press.

In 1998, Delacorte Press published Hickam’s second book, Rocket Boys: A Memoir, the story of his life in the little town of Coalwood, West Virginia. It became an instant classic. Rocket Boys has since been translated into eight languages and also released as an abridged audio book and electronic book. Among it’s many honors, it was selected by the New York Times as one of its “Great Books of 1998” and was an alternate “Book-of-the-Month” selection for both the Literary Guild and Doubleday book clubs. Rocket Boys was also nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as Best Biography of 1998. In February, 1999, Universal Studios released its critically-acclaimed film October Sky, based on Rocket Boys (The title October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys). Delacorte subsequently released a mass market paperback of Rocket Boys, re-titled October Sky. October Sky reached the New York Times # 1 position on their best-seller list.

Mr. Hickam’s first fiction novel was Back to the Moon (1999) that was also simultaneously released as a hardcover, audio book, and eBook. It has also been translated into Chinese.

The Coalwood Way (2000), a memoir of Mr. Hickam’s hometown he calls “not a sequel but an equal,” was published by Delacorte Press and is available in abridged audio, eBook, large print and Japanese. It was an alternate “Book-of-the-Month” selection for Doubleday book club. His third Coalwood memoir, a true sequel, was published in October 2001. It is titled Sky of Stone (2001). An associated book about Coalwood was published in 2002, a self help/inspirational tome titled We Are Not Afraid: Strength and Courage from the Town That Inspired the #1 Bestseller and Award-Winning Movie October Sky.

Mr. Hickam is also the author of a popular series of novels that feature Josh Thurlow, a Coast Guard officer during World War II. The series began with The Keeper’s Son (2003), and then continued with The Ambassador’s Son (2005) and The Far Reaches (2007). To meet the requests from publishers for a Young Adult series, Homer also wrote his Helium-3 novels titled Crater, Crescent, and Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company. These two series have been heavily praised by critics and readers as have Homer’s novel about a coal miner’s wife in Red Helmet, and a thriller set in modern-day Montana titled The Dinosaur Hunter.

His latest work, published in October, 2015, is the critically acclaimed novel Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of a Man, his Wife, and her Alligator.

While working on his writing career, Mr. Hickam was employed as an engineer for the U.S. Army Missile Command from 1971 to 1981 assigned to Huntsville, Alabama, and Germany. He began employment with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1981 as an aerospace engineer. During his NASA career, Mr. Hickam worked in spacecraft design and crew training. His specialties at NASA included training astronauts on science payloads, and extravehicular activities (EVA). He also trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J (the first Japanese astronauts), and the Solar Max repair mission. Prior to his retirement in 1998, Mr. Hickam was the Payload Training Manager for the International Space Station Program.

In 1984, Mr. Hickam was presented with Alabama’s Distinguished Service Award for heroism shown during a rescue effort of the crew and passengers of a sunken paddleboat in the Tennessee River. Because of this award, Mr. Hickam was honored in 1996 by the United States Olympic Committee to carry the Olympic Torch through Huntsville, Alabama, on its way to Atlanta.

Mr. Hickam has received many awards and honors. Among them are the prestigious University of Alabama’s Clarence Cason Award and the Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award for his memoirs and fiction. He also received an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Marshall University.

Mr. Hickam is married to Linda Terry Hickam, an artist and his first editor and assistant. They love their cats and share their time between homes in Alabama and the Virgin Islands."

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Author Bio:

Brett Armstrong has been exploring other worlds as a writer since age nine. Years later, he still writes, but now invites others along on his expeditions. He’s shown readers haunting, poignant historical fiction (Destitutio Quod Remissio), scary-real dystopian sci-fi (Day Moon and Veiled Sun), and dark, sweeping epic fantasy (Quest of Fire). Where he heads next is as much a discovery for him as readers. Through dark, despair, light, joy, and everything in between, the end is always meant to leave his fellow literary explorers with wonder and hope.

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Author Bio:

Melinda Taliancich Falgoust is an internationally award-winning author of fiction for children and adults. Her work has appeared in Readers' Digest, Writer's Journal, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and with Harlequin Books. Her titles have garnered accolades and honors from the New York Book Festival, the Oshima Picture Book Museum International Picture Book Competition, the Green Book Festival and the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition among others. When she's not writing, she can frequently be found presenting worldwide, most recently at the Japan Writers' Conference, the Killer Nashville International Conference and Fay B. Kaigler Children's Literature Conference. From board books to adult action-thrillers, when you look between the pages of a book from Melinda Falgoust and Wagging Tales Press, you'll find "stories so good, you'll be begging for more!"

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Author Bio:

Andréa Fekete’s literary novel of the historical coal mine wars, Waters Run Wild, (2018) explores women's & immigrant life in the coal camps of West Virginia. She has two poetry chapbooks, I Held a Morning (2012) and Dear Lovely (2020). Her poetry & fiction appear in many journals & anthologies such as Chiron Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Kentucky Review, The Montucky Review, The Smithville Journal, The Adirondack Review, ABZ, and in anthologies such as Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction & Poetry from West Virginia, among many others. She & Lara Lillibridge co-curated Feminine Rising: Voices of Power & Invisibility (2019). The book took the Silver in Foreword Review's Indie Book of the Year in Women's Studies. An excerpt from her unpublished novel Native Trees was a finalist in Still: The Journal's 2019 Fiction contest. She was awarded a grant from the Mid-Atlantic Foundation for the Arts to take residency at the internationally renowned Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She taught college English & writing for almost 15 years at multiple universities in West Virginia, Kentucky & Ohio

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Author Bio:

Cat Pleska is an educator, award-winning author, and frequent writing workshop leader. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by West Virginia University Press, May 2015. Foreword Magazine short-listed her memoir for the 2015 book of the year. She edited three anthologies: Fearless: Women’s Journeys to Self-Empowerment (MSP, 2019); Voices on Unity: Coming Together, Falling Apart (MSP, 2017); and Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains (Woodland Press, 2012). Her essays and memoir pieces have been published in Still: The Journal, Heartwood Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Change Seven Magazine, Traditions, and many other publications. Cat is the 2016 recipient of the Governor’s Arts Award for Support of the Arts. She is currently writing a travel essay collection titled: The I’s Have It: Travels to Ireland and Iceland.

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Author Bio:

Bonnie Proudfoot earned a BA from Fairmont State University, an MA from West Virginia University, and another MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She received a Fellowship for the Arts in Fiction from the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, and has had fiction and poetry published in The Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Northern Appalachia Review, and other journals. Her short story Old Spirits placed first in the 2020 Sand Hills Journal Short fiction competition. Goshen Road, her first novel, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020, and it was selected by the Women’s National Book Association as one of their Great Group Reads for 2020. The novel was selected for the Longlist for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for a Debut Novel. She currently resides in Athens, Ohio.

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Author Bio:

David Mould, Professor Emeritus of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University, is the author of three books on travel, history and culture, and features published in Newsweek, The Christian Science Monitor, Times Higher Education, History News Network and other print and online media. Born in the UK, he worked as a newspaper and TV journalist before moving to the US. He has visited more than 40 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. Kirkus Reviews describes him as “a genial travel guide … an academic who does not write like an academic.” In a 2020 interview, Rick Steves said that his second book, Monsoon Postcards: Indian Ocean Journeys, “reads like you’ve got a friend who’s really connected and committed to these cultures.” He was a featured author for the April 2021 Ohioana Book Festival for his latest book, Postcards from the Borderlands (2020).

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Author Bio:

Vincent Trimboli holds in MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College. In 2016, Trimboli published two chapbooks with Ghost City Press: Condominium Morte and other milkweed diners. In 2019, Trimboli’s third chapbook, Book of Rabbits, was published with Moon Tide press. His poems can be found in Connotation Press, Still Journal, Wussy Magazine, The San Diego Reader, and Cultural Weekly. Trimboli is a Pushcart Prize nominee for his poems in the latter. Vince has taught Writing and Public Speaking in a Medium/Maximum Security Prison in the hills of West Virginia as well as many other institutions. Trimboli is currently teaching as the Irene McKenny Fellow at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He also has given multiple readings at many bookstores and events across the US.

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Author Bio:

Jo Ann Dadisman is a veteran storyteller and career educator who weaves stories from her beloved mountains into teaching opportunities. These stories range from historical tales (some told in first person) to tall tales, fables and myths, traditional tales and family stories. She has told stories to groups of all sizes and ages for decades. In this program she will share both collection strategies and stories from Dr. John Harrington Cox, a folklorist who taught at WVU during the early 1900s. Jo Ann taught in the English Department as well for more than 20 years and was honored to receive the WVU Eberly College Arts and Sciences Teacher of the Year Award in 2011.

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Author Bio:

Since 1998, Joe Geiger has worked for West Virginia Archives and History, serving as historian, webmaster and assistant director before being named director in 2007. Geiger, who lives in Huntington, serves as West Virginia's state archivist and state historian and is responsible for preserving West Virginia’s history. He has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in history, both from Marshall University. He formerly served as an adjunct instructor in the history departments at Marshall University and West Virginia State University and has published a number of articles and three books, including Holding the Line: The Battle of Allegheny Mountain and Confederate Defense of the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, 1861-1862, and his most recent publication, Disorder on the Border: Civil Warfare in Cabell and Wayne Counties, West Virginia, 1856-1870.

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Author Bio:

On September 11, 1961, Terry Catasús Jennings landed in the United States after a short flight from Cuba. On September 12th, she was enrolled in seventh grade in an American school. Her family, including her father who had been jailed during the Bay of Pigs invasion, was now in a free country. The only catch for twelve-year-old Terry was that she could count in English and recite the days of the week and the months of the year, but not much more. Often being the only Cuban in her school — even through college — Terry knows what it’s like to be the new kid on the block. She is delighted to have the opportunity, with Definitely Dominguita, to portray a typical child of immigrants—no different than her peers — other than she loves the classics (like Jennings did as a child) and thinks Cuban food rules.

As a child, Terry dreamed of being an author, but she was dissuaded from a writing career and instead majored in math and physics at the University of Richmond, in Virginia. She worked in finance for many years. Once her children were born, she stayed home and became a very committed volunteer. Terry decided to give writing a chance once her kids reached high school. The first essay she ever submitted — about teaching her daughter to drive — was published by The Washington Post. Since then, she has published other newspaper and magazine articles and written a weekly humor column for The Reston Connection newspaper. She wrote educational content for the Smithsonian Science Education Center and internet sources. From that, she transitioned to writing award-winning science and history-based nonfiction books for children. With Definitely Dominguita, she has fulfilled her dream of writing fiction for children.

What Terry loves about working on the Definitely Dominguita series is revisiting books she loved as a child and imagining a modern, but similar, adventure for Dominguita and her friends. Most fun was creating the mythical suburban town of Mundytown—a fun place full of caring characters—where Dom and her crew have freedom to roam.

Terry lives with her husband in Reston, Virginia and enjoys spending winters hiking and biking in Southern Utah. She enjoys visiting with her four grandchildren and often encourages them to bring their parents along. She is a member of SCBWI, Las Musas Latinx Collective and the Children’s Book Guild of Washington, DC.

Book Signing Info: TBA

Author Bio:

Kara Dixon Vuic is the LCpl. Benjamin W. Schmidt Professor of War, Conflict, and Society in Twentieth-Century America at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses on U.S. wars and American society, gender and war, and memory and war.

She is the author of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Harvard University Press, 2019), which won the Tonous and Warda Johns Family Book Award from the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch.

Her first book, Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), won the Lavinia L. Dock Book Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing, was named a Book of the Year in History and Public Policy by the American Journal of Nursing, and was a finalist for the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award.

She also edited The Routledge Handbook on Gender, War, and the U.S. Military (2017) and is co-editor (with Richard Fogarty) of the University of Nebraska Press’s book series “Studies in War, Society, and the Military.” She co-edited the forthcoming collection Managing Sex in the U.S. Military (University of Nebraska Press) and is writing a new book called “Drafting Women.”

She has published articles and essays in several books and journals on topics ranging from military integration to wartime nursing, gender and war, family planning in the military, and women veterans. Her op-eds on women and the military have appeared in The Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the Raleigh News & Observer.

She serves as a Trustee for the Society for Military History, and is on the Advisory Board to Eastern National for the Vietnam Women’s Memorial.

Vuic has won grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Schlesinger Library, American Historical Association; FDR, Harry Truman, and Gerald R. Ford Presidential Libraries; Military History Institute, and the Center for Military History.

She earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2006.

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Author Bio:

Judi Tarowsky comes to storytelling after a career in the Upper Ohio Valley as a newspaper journalist. She enjoys telling folk tales, stories from Celtic lands, historic narratives, original tale tales, and ghost stories. Her audiences have included libraries, festivals, schools, and special occasions. Her presentation in this program will include background of West Virginia ghost lore as collected by Dr. Patrick Gainer, Dr. James G. Jones, and Mack Samples.