December 29, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Hello, readers! Brooke County Libraries are excited to present our last West Virginia Author of the Month. For December 2021, we are featuring prolific writer Denise Giardina.

Denise Giardina´s novels have won the American Book Award, the Lillian Smith Award for fiction, and the Boston Book Review fiction prize. Her roots run deep in the coal mines of Appalachia and stories about coal miners, companies and unions are at the center of two of her books. Her words may be fiction, but they describe the true experiences of underground coal mining in West Virginia.

Giardina was born October 25, 1951 in Bluefield, West Virginia, and grew up in the small coal mining camp of Black Wolf, located in rural McDowell County, West Virginia, and later in Kanawha County, where she graduated from high school. Like the rest of the community, her family's survival was dependent upon the prosperity of the mine. Giardina's grandfather and uncles worked underground and her father kept the books for Page Coal and Coke. Her mother was a nurse. When the mine closed, her family moved to the state capital of Charleston. As a member of a coal-mining family, and growing up with a 1960s social consciousness, Giardina often found herself in political conflict with the people and culture around her.

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 AppalachianSouth. The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction. Her 1998 novel Saints and Villains was awarded the Boston Book Review fiction prize and was semifinalist for the International Dublin Literary Award. Giardina is an ordained Episcopal Church deacon, a community activist, and a former candidate for governor of West Virginia.

Giardina tells her stories using multiple narrators who speak in local dialect and offer different points of view. The Unquiet Earth reveals the blatant disregard of the miners and their families, by the coal companies; black Lung disease and unsafe working conditions play a part in the book.

As well as being a writer, Giardina has been an activist for environmental justice since the 1970s. She made a bid to be governor of West Virginia in 2000 as a third-party candidate, using her campaign to raise awareness about the devastating and toxic effects of mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). MTR blows off the tops of ancient mountains, exposing layers of coal. It makes mining easier, yet destroys forests and plant life, and pollutes streams. Toxic runoff from the mining process leach into communities (where people have lived for generations), forcing them to leave their homes. West Virginia´s progressive, Mountain Party, affiliated with the Green Party, sprang from Giardina's gubernatorial run.

In 2004 Giardina was the Writer-In-Residence at Hollins University and taught a course in Virginia and West Virginia fiction.

Giardina lives in Charleston and taught at West Virginia State University until 2015. In 2007 she was reinstated as an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Denise Giardina's pride in her Appalachian background informs her writing and helps drive her fight to protect the mountains and people she loves. 

Interested in some of the titles mentioned here? Check out some this author's work in our ebook collection on WV Reads!

https://wvreads.overdrive.com/search?query=Denise%20Giardina

Images and info are courtesy of Google, Wikipedia, WV Reads, and author web pages.

 

November 26, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Brooke County Libraries are proud to feature November's WV WV Author of the Month: Marc Harshman!

Let us know if you have some favorites of his work. We'd love to hear from you in our comment section below or on any of our social media pages.

Marc Harshman is the poet laureate of West Virginia, appointed by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin in May 2012. His poems have appeared in such publications as Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The Progressive, Appalachian Heritage, Bateau, and Fourteen Hills. Other poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona.

His eleven children's books include ONLY ONE, a Reading Rainbow review title on PBS TV and THE STORM, a Junior Library Guild selection and Smithsonian Notable Book Parent's Choice Award recipient. Booklist has called this same title "a knowing book that will speak to all children about self-image and hard-won success."

Mr. Harshman was honored in 1994 by receiving the Ezra Jack Keats/ Kerlan Collection Fellowship from the University of Minnesota for research of Scandinavian myth and folklore. He was also named the West Virginia State English Teacher of the Year by the West Virginia English Language Arts Council in 1995. More recently, he was named the recipient of the WV Arts Commission Fellowship in Poetry for the year 2000 and the Fellowship in Children's Literature for 2008. His children's titles have been published in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Danish, and Swedish.

Marc is fondly known by many as a storyteller who served for over twenty years as a judge for the WV Liar's Contest held at the Vandalia Gathering in Charleston, WV. He has also served as an instructor for the historic Appalachian Writer's Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, KY.

Marc holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale Divinity School, and the University of Pittsburgh. He recently received an honorary doctorate from Bethany College in recognition of his life's work.

In honor of West Virginia's Sesquicentennial, Marc was commissioned by the Wheeling National Heritage Area to write a poem celebrating this event. This poem, "A Song for West Virginia," was presented in both Charleston and Wheeling as part of the day-long festivities held that day. (less)

 Images and info are courtesy of Google, Wikipedia, Goodreads, and author web pages.

Check out Fallingwater, one of Marc's beloved stories, on WV Reads ebooks!

Fallingwater - West Virginia Reads - OverDrive

October 28, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Brooke County Libraries are proud to present one of West Virginia's best little known authors - Meredith Sue Willis! This October we are featuring work and life in the Mountain State.

Meredith Sue Willis, born and raised in West Virginia, is a novelist and teacher. She teaches novel writing at New York University's School of Professional Studies.

Her mother's family has lived in North Central West Virginia for several generations, and her father's family, from Appalachian Lee County, Virginia, followed jobs with Consolidation Coal Company through Virginia, Kentucky, and finally West Virginia.

Meredith Sue was educated in the public schools of Shinnston, West Virginia,where her father was her science teacher. Her mother was also trained as a teacher, and all four of her aunts and uncles on both sides of the family were teachers. Her Willis grandparents operated a country store in Wise County, Virginia, and her Meredith grandfather witnessed the Great Monongah, West Virginia, mine explosion of 1907, in which hundreds of miners were killed. Her Meredith grandmother was a mining camp midwife.

After attending Bucknell University for two years, MSW spent a year as a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) in Norfolk, Virginia. She fictionalized this experience in the second book of her Blair Morgan trilogy, Only Great Changes (Scribner's 1985; Hamilton Stone Editions, 1997).

After the year in VISTA, she transferred to Barnard College in New York City where she was involved in work against the Vietnam War as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society. She participated in the 1968 Columbia University anti-war sit-ins, fictionalized in Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions, 1997)

She graduated from Barnard College Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and went to work as a so-called recreation therapist for a year at Bellevue Hospital. This job included calling a lot of bingo games and a newsletter for the long term patients in the vast, un-air-conditioned rehab wards of the old old Bellevue.

She then took a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, studying with Anthony Burgess, Lore Segal and others. The most important connection she made during her time at the Columbia School of the Arts was a program formed by Phillip Lopate at P.S. 75 that included Karen Hubert, Terry Mack, and others. This program, through Teachers & Writers Collaborative (see below for names of people in photo at left), was one of the earliest of the arts-in-education organizations.

At the end of the nineteen-seventies, MSW had her first novel accepted for publication: A Space Apart  (Scribner's, 1979) . It was followed by Higher Ground (Scribner's, 1981; Hamilton Stone Editions 1996) and Only Great Changes (Scribner's, 1985; Hamilton Stone Editions1997). The final book of the trilogy, Trespassers, was published by Hamilton Stone Editions in 1997.

MSW married Andrew B. Weinberger in 1982--only twelve years after they began living together, and their son Joel Howard Willis Weinberger was born in 1985, twenty years to the day after their first date.

Andy has just retired as a medical specialist in rheumatology, and Joel (a graduate of Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey) is a Ph.d software engineer for Snap, Inc. in Los Angeles. He is married to Sarah Zakowski Weinberger, a specialist in the delivery of health care. They are the parents of Shira (four) and Eli (one and a quarter).

MSW has given many workshops and performances of her writing and won many prizes including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has participated in the Circuit Writers program of the West Virginia Humanities Council and presented at many workshops and conferences.

Her writing about the Appalachian Region was the subject of the Fourteenth Annual Emory & Henry Literary Festival in Emory, Virginia, in 1995, and the proceedings of that festival were published in a special issue of The Iron Mountain Review. She was also the featured writer in the Fall, 2006 issue of Appalachian Heritage.

She received the Literary Award of the West Virginia Library Association and was the 1990 West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival Non-Italian Woman of the Year. In May 2004, she received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from West Virginia University.

Currently living in the City of Orange, New Jersey, near New York City, teaching at New York University's School of Professional Studies and working on her own writing, MSW is also the chair of the Social Action Committee of the Ethical Culture Society of Essex County and is co-chair of the Coalition on Race's Schools Committee.

In her spare time, she tries to support the Garden State by keeping a four season organic garden in her backyard.

 Images and info are courtesy of Google, Wikipedia, and author's web page.

Ms. Willis loves to blog and keep in touch with her readers and aspiring writers! Check out her webpage: Meredith Sue Willis Author and Teacher

September 29, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Brooke County Libraries are proud to present our September WV Author of the Month (2021) - Cynthia Rylant.

Cynthia Rylant (born June 6, 1954) is an American author and librarian. She has written more than 100 children's books, including works of fiction (picture books, short stories and novels), nonfiction, and poetry. Several of her books have won awards, including her novel Missing May, which won the 1993 Newbery Medal, and A Fine White Dust, which was a 1987 Newbery Honor book. Two of her books are Caldecott Honor Books.

Rylant was born in Hopewell, West Virginia, the daughter of a U.S. Army veteran, John Tune Smith, and Leatrel Smith née Rylant. Rylant uses her mother's maiden name as her pen name. She spent her first four years in Illinois. Her parents separated when she was four years old, and she was sent to live with her mother's parents in Cool Ridge, West Virginia, while her mother attended nursing school and was able to visit her only a few times a year. Growing up in the Appalachian region of the U.S. during the 1960s, Rylant lived in a very depressed economic environment. Her grandparents, extended family and kind local townspeople provided a nurturing, safe environment, while the little girl "waited ... until someone could return for me", but they were very poor and lived a rustic life, with no electricity, running water or automobiles. As a result, she never saw children's books as a child, reading mainly comic books and enjoying the outdoors.

Four years later, she moved back with her mother, who had relocated to nearby Beaver, West Virginia. There had been no libraries or bookstores in Cool Ridge, and there were none in Beaver. Rylant never saw her father again, and he died when she was thirteen years old in 1967. She later wrote, "I did not have a chance to know him or to say goodbye to him, and that is all the loss I needed to become a writer.". When she was nine years old, Rylant fell in love with Paul McCartney and The Beatles. However, her West Virginia childhood was the major influence on her works, and many of them deal with life in the Appalachian region. As a teenager, Rylant became enchanted with Robert F. Kennedy, whom she met during his presidential campaign. She was deeply affected by his assassination. Also important to her emotional development was her relationship with a boy from school.

Rylant earned a B.A. degree from Morris Harvey College (now the University of Charleston) in 1975 and a M.A. degree from Marshall University in 1976, discovering and studying English literature and greatly enjoying her years in school. In 1977, she married Kevin Dolin. Unable to find a job in her field after completing college, she first worked as a waitress and later as a librarian at the Cabell County Public Library in Huntington, West Virginia, where she finally became acquainted with children's books. She taught English part-time at Marshall University in 1979 and wrote her first book, When I Was Young in the Mountains,based on her experiences as a young child living in the country with her grandparents. The picture book, which Rylant later said took her an hour to complete, earned an American Book Award in 1982 and was a Caldecott Honor Book. Her marriage with Dolin ended in 1980, and she earned a Masters degree in Library Science from Kent State University in 1981. She lived in Kent, Ohio, for many years, working as a librarian at the Cincinnati Public Library. She later moved to Akron, Ohio, and worked at the Akron Public Library while teaching English part-time at the University of Akron. For a period she was in a romantic relationship with Dav Pilkey, author of Captain Underpants.

Rylant's 1992 young adult novel, Missing May, is a touching story about a girl who lives with relatives after the death of her mother and who must comfort her uncle after the death of his beloved wife. Beginning in the early 1990s, Rylant has published several series designed for younger readers, including the Lighthouse Family, High-rise Private Eyes, and Everyday Books series, the last of which is a series for very young children that she illustrated herself. She also illustrated several of her other books, including the playful Dog Heaven (1995), about an ideal dog afterlife. Other poetry collections have been God Went to Beauty School (2003) and Boris (2005).

Rylant has received a number of awards and honors for her work. A Fine White Dust (1987) won a Newbery Honor,[11] and Missing May (1993) won a Newbery Medal. When I Was Young in the Mountains (1982) and The Relatives Came (1985) received Caldecott Honors. The Relatives Came and Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds (1991) are each Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor Books, as is Missing May, which deals with the loss of a loved one. A Kindness (1988), Soda Jerk (1990), and A Couple of Kooks and Other Stories about Love (1990) have each been named a "Best Book of the Year for Young Adults" by the American Library Association.

Check out some Ms. Rylant's work in our ebook library on WV Reads!

https://wvreads.overdrive.com/search?query=Cynthia%20Rylant

Are you a fan of her work already? Let us know your favorites in the comment section or on any of our social media pages!

(Images and info courtesy of Wikipedia, Google, and author's web page).

 

August 26, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Brooke County Libaries are excited to present our August 2021 WV Author of the Month - Jeannette Walls.

Jeannette Walls is a writer and journalist. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, she graduated with honors from Barnard College, the women's college affiliated with Columbia University. She published a bestselling memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005.

Jeannette Walls is an American author and journalist widely known as former gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and author of The Glass Castle, a memoir of the nomadic family life of her childhood. Published in 2005, it had been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 421 weeks as of June 3, 2018. She is a 2006 recipient of the Alex Awards and Christopher Award. For decades, Jeannette Walls hid her hardscrabble past as the child of two rebellious, nonconformist parents who led a family that was at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. 

Walls moved to New York at age 17 to join her sister Lori (at that point a waitress and soon working as an artist for Archie Comics). She married fellow New York writer John J. Taylor in 2002, and the couple now lives outside Culpeper, Virginia, on a 205-acre farm. In 2009, Walls published her first novel, Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel, based on the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith. 

Jeannette Walls was awarded New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year in 2009

Walls' latest novel, The Silver Star, was published in 2013.

Let us know if you've read any of her moving novels! We love to hear from our readers either in the comments below or on any of our social media pages.

Images and info courtesy of Google and author/publisher webpages.
 

July 27, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Carlene Thompson is the author of Last Whisper, Black for Remembrance, Nowhere to Hide, and Don’t Close Your Eyes, among other books. She attended college at Marshall University and earned her Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University. She taught at the University of Rio Grande, before leaving to focus on her writing full-time. Besides writing, she spends her time caring for the many dogs and cats she's adopted. A native West Virginian, she lives with her husband Keith in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

Carlene Thompson is an American author of suspense thriller novels. Her first book, Black for Remembrance, was published in 1990 by Little, Brown and was well received. Her books are suspense novels, often with romantic elements and many take place in Thompson's home state of West Virginia.

A huge animal lover, she tries to include at least one of her pets into each book she writes, which to her is a way to immortalize them. Carlene Thompson came up with the idea for first published novel, Black for Remembrance, when she was walking her dogs in the woods. 

Her latest novel is Praying for Time. Published in 2020.

"She thought her prayers had been answered. Now she’s praying for time. Vanessa Everly is a successful actress in Los Angeles, but she’s still traumatized by the night that ripped her world apart."

Have you read any of Ms. Thompson's stories? Let us know! Also don't forget to check out some of her novels if you haven't already. There are many available at both our locations or on our ebook site WV Reads!

Images and info courtesy of Google and author/publisher webpages.

 

June 25, 2020 - WV Author of the Month

Brooke County Libraries are proud to present out WV Author of the Month! The pick for June 2021 is Stephen Coonts.

Stephen Coonts is an American author who is know for his thriller and suspense novels. Coonts was originally an aviator in the US Army during the Vietnam War, which he has parlayed into his current career as a novelist. The majority of his books have made their way to the New York Times Bestseller List.

Stephen Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coal mining town. Following high school graduation, he earned a B.A. degree in political science at West Virginia University in 1968. After joining the Navy upon graduation and then going to Officer Candidate School, Coonts went to flight school at Naval Air Station Pensacola and earned his wings as a Naval Aviator in 1969.

After leaving active duty, Coonts pursued a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1979. He then worked as a lawyer for several oil and gas companies, pursuing his writing interests in his free time.

Coonts began writing Flight of the Intruder in 1984, with the book being published by the US Naval Institute Pressin 1986. 

Published August 13, 2019. Stephen Coonts' newest thriller, The Russia Account, pits the CIA's Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini against a murderous international financial conspiracy that leaves a trail of death and corruption in its wake. From a small branch bank in Estonia to the highest reaches of the Kremlin, to the halls of Congress and perhaps even to the White House and CIA itself....

Check out some of Mr. Coonts' work at either of our locations or online with our ebook site WV Reads!

Images and info courtesy of Google and author/publisher webpages.
 

May 28, 2021 - WV Author of the Month

Meet our Brooke County Libraries' WV Author of the Month - Craig Johnson.

Craig Allen Johnson (born January 16, 1961) is an American author who writes mystery novels. He is best known for his Sheriff Walt Longmire novel series. The books are set in northern Wyoming, where Longmire is sheriff of the fictional county of Absaroka. The series debuted in 2004 and as of September 2019, Johnson has written 15 novels, two novellas, and many short stories featuring Longmire.

Craig Johnson grew up in Huntington, WV, and attended college at Marshall University.

Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, with his wife Judy.

The success of Johnson's novels is celebrated in an annual festival, called Longmire Day, held in the small town of Buffalo, Wyoming, the real-life inspiration for the series' fictional setting. Close to 12,000 people attend the festival each year, including the author, many of the actors from the TV series, and (on occasion) the publishers and producers.

Next To Last Stand, the 16th novel in the Walt Longmire series, was released on September 22, 2020 and is a New York Times bestseller. 

We've got a selection of the Longmire novels in both our locations and on our ebook site WV Reads! Let us know what some of your favorites are below...

 

Images and info courtesy of Google and author/publisher webpages.