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.”—Luis Urrea, author of The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek, The United States of Appalachia and In the Sierra Madre, Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, educator, and radio correspondent across the United States, Europe, India and Mexico. He served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West. His award-winning stories have appeared on National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and Washington Post, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon, among many others newspapers, magazines and online journals. He regularly blogs for the Huffington Post. A frequent speaker and performer at festivals, conferences and educational institutions, Biggers is also a playwright, whose “4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire” theatrical production has appeared on Off Broadway and at theatres around the country.
His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, a Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, the Delta Award for Southern Illinois literature, a Field Foundation Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award/Fellowship. 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 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, where he co-founded the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing.
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. He presently divides his time between Tucson, Arizona and Illinois.
