Denise Giardina

Denise Giardina is an American novelist. 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. 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.

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

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.

Run for governor The Mountain Party of West Virginia was born as a result of Charlotte Pritt's 1992 and 1996 candidacies for Governor of West Virginia. 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. In 2009, Giardina published Emily's Ghost, a fictionalized biography of poet and novelist Emily Bronte. Both novels received warm, though not rave reviews. However, the fact that major national reviewer attended to her work was an achievement her previous, only-later more appreciated work, failed to accomplish.

In 2015, Giardina announced she was working on a memoir and a new novel, and noted that she had begun writing plays, though none had yet achieved production. 1997 – West Virginia Library Association Literary Merit Award 1996 – National Endowment for the Arts grant 1993 – American Book Award, The Unquiet Earth 1988 – Appalachian Book of the Year, Storming Heaven 1988 – National Endowment for the Arts grant 1987 – Weatherford Award for Significant Appalachian Work, Fiction, Storming Heaven

Critical works about Denise Giardina In March 2020, George Fox University professor William Jolliff's book Heeding the Call: A Study of Denise Giardina 's Novels was published by West Virginia University Press. In the book, Jolliff dedicates a chapter to each of the writer and activist's novels, examining them from three perspectives: Regional, political, and theological. He analyzes her use of history and writing technique, as well as delving into the themes of significance in each of her works. He concludes that though her writing is largely informed by her own religious beliefs, Giardina never provides theological answers to the issues raised in her very political fiction; rather, she pushes both characters and readers to confront and wrangle with ever more complex and challenging moral and philosophical questions.