Thursday, September 21, 2006

Writer/contact: Jordana Rich, 706/542-2659, jerich@uga.edu

Author Jeff Biggers to read at UGA on Oct. 4

Athens, Ga. – Award-winning author Jeff Biggers will read from his work on Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 4 p.m. in room 265 of Park Hall on the University of Georgia campus.  The event is sponsored by UGA’s Creative Writing Program and is free and open to the public.

Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia and numerous stories.  His work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic, and he is co-editor of No Lonesome Road, winner of the American Book Award in 2005.  He has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Book TV,” Public Radio International’s “Savy Traveler” and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“Jeff Biggers’ inspiring book should be a best seller immediately.  Read it and your faltering hopes will rise,” says Studs Terkel of United States of Appalachia.    Luis Urrea writes, “Jeff Biggers has the keenest eye in the business, and he has a fine luminous voice to tell you what he has seen.  Biggers manages to write like a poet, a historian, a naturalist and an adventurer.”

Biggers has received numerous honors, including a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Field Foundation Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship.  He serves as 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 literacy programs in rural, reservation and neglected communities in the American Southwest, he founded the Northern Arizona Book Festival.

Biggers holds a B.A. in history and English from Hunter College and has studied at the University of California–Berkeley, Columbia University and the University of Arizona.

For more information, visit www.jeffbiggers.com.

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