Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist, novelist and playwright. Author of ten books, his work has appeared on National Public Radio and Public Radio International, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post, Salon, among many journals. As a playwright and performer of monologues, he appears at theatres, festivals, conferences and schools. Based in the US and Italy, Biggers has worked as a writer, performer and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico. He has served as Writer in Residence at Indiana University, the University of Iowa and Wesleyan University. Through narrative nonfiction, journalism, theatre, and fiction, Biggers focuses on a historical storytelling approach he calls "re-storification," the process of unearthing and forging new stories, rituals, and gatherings that recover the withered or denied strands of history and reshape its continuum between the past, present and future.

Expanding on his landmark book, The United States of Appalachia, Biggers will explore the continued role of the Appalachian region in shaping American history.