Denise Giardina

Denise Giardina is an American novelist.

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.

Giardina received a BA in history from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973.

She pursued graduate work at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and was preparing to go to law school.

At this point, however, Giardina found a new spiritual home in the Episcopal church, which she found to be more broad-minded than the fundamentalist Methodism of her childhood.

Her pastor, Jim Lewis, provided reading suggestions that helped steer Giardina from law school to seminary: "I thought I was called to be ordained. I realized later I went because I needed that education for writing. [My books] are actually more theological than political."

She received a Masters of Divinity from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1979, was ordained as an Episcopal deacon, and returned to lead a church in the area of West Virginia where she grew up.

However, she soon found herself in a conflict with superiors in the church due to her criticism of the coal companies, and left within a year.

She moved to Washington, D.C., where she joined a peace campaign and lived communally with some radical Christians in an inner city outpost.

This is when she began writing her first novel, Good King Harry.

She later moved back to rural West Virginia for a while, then took a job as a congressional aide in Charleston.

As a political activist Giardina participated in and wrote about Appalachian labor-capital conflicts, including the A. T. Massey coal strike of the mid-1980s, and the Pittston coal strike of 1989-1990.

In the following years she was vocal in her critique of surface mining and other environmental issues, particularly mountaintop removal coal mining.

The novel eventually sold to Harper and Row, and was published in 1984.

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 Appalachian South.

The Unquiet Earth received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award for fiction.

The Mountain Party of West Virginia was born as a result of Charlotte Pritt's 1992 and 1996 candidacies for Governor of West Virginia.

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.

These issues informed her unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2000.

Giardina credits her mother and her upbringing in a conservative fundamentalist church for shaping her political sensibilities.

Though she sought a more liberal religious setting later, her early church experience inculcated Giardina with basic values of charity and fairness that reinforced her mother's lessons on justice and tolerance.

Her mother herself was not a fundamentalist, though many other family members and most of the surrounding community were, including Giardina's only brother.

Giardina became the first statewide nominee of the new party in the 2000 general election.

She received 10,416 votes, 1.61% of the vote, coming in third behind Democrat Bob Wise and Republican incumbent Cecil H. Underwood.

Her platform included many of the environmental and miners' rights issues she worked on as an activist.

Giardina says that though her writing focused her emerging political views, it took the controversy over mountain top removal mining to move her to political action.

According to Still journal, her "anti-mountaintop removal platform she became a folk hero and is often looked to as one of the primary commentators on the state of contemporary Appalachia".

In all of her books, Giardina is interested in the complexities and ambiguities of the individual destined to answer the call of his or her particular moment.

Though largely recognized as an Appalachian writer, she has been defined, and defines herself, as primarily a theological writer.

Giardina became interested in the Appallachian tradition of storytelling at an early age, and this oral literary heritage of the mountains informed much of her later work.

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

In 2007 she was reinstated as an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church.

Her papers, including notebooks, artifacts, correspondence, manuscripts, and family photos are held in the Archives & Manuscripts at West Virginia University's West Virginia & Regional History Center.

Giardina lives in Charleston and taught at West Virginia State University until 2015.