Jeff Biggers is an 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, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Brick Magazine (Toronto) and Il Giornale (Italy). As a playwright and performer of monologues, he appears at theatres, festivals, conferences and schools. Based in Iowa and Italy, Biggers has worked as a writer, performer and educator across the United States, Europe, India, and Mexico.
In the fall of 2024, he released his debut novel Disturbing the Bones, with coauthor Andrew Davis, the celebrated film director of The Fugitive, Holes, Perfect Murder and other classic films. A starred review in Publishers Weekly praised the novel for "intense, vivid action and the intricate interweaving."
His latest nonfiction book, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy, released on May 23, 2023, was praised by the Times Literary Supplement as "much more than a travelogue, compendious and evocative," and "an enthusiastic and erudite guide" by the Wall Street Journal. In an Italian review for Sardegnablogger journal, reviewer Fiorenzo Caterini called it "a masterpiece."
Founder of the Climate Narrative Project, an arts and advocacy project, Biggers has given lectures, readings and performances at over 100 universities and schools across the country, from the University of California in Berkeley, the University of Mississippi, Yale University to the University of Rome (La Sapienza). Biggers has served as the Climate Narrative Playwright-in-Residence at Indiana University Northwest, the Sustainability Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa, the Campbell-Stripling Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan College in Georgia, and delivered the keynote address at numerous literary, urban planning and environmental conferences.
His nonfiction works include The Trials of a Scold, longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography, State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science Book in 2012; Reckoning at Eagle Creek, recipient of the Delta Award for Literature and the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting; In the Sierra Madre, winner of the Foreword Magazine Travel Book of the Year Award and the Illinois Arts Council Nonfiction Award; and The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a "masterpiece of popular history." He also served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West, which won the American Book Award, and wrote the foreword to the re-issue of Huey Perry's classic, They'll Cut Off Your Project.
His work has received numerous honors, including an American Book Award, David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award for Travel Writing, Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, Delta Award for Literature, Plattner Award for Appalachian Literature, Illinois Arts Council Creative Non-Fiction Award, Southwest Book of the Year, Garst Memorial Award for Media (UN Association Iowa), Calumet Artist Residency and a Field Foundation Fellowship. His play, "4 1/2 Hours: Across the Stones of Fire," won the "Greener Planet Award" at the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity in New York City. Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine selected Biggers as one of its 100 Pioneers.
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, which featured Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison and Czeslaw Milosz, among others. In the 1980s, Biggers served as an assistant to former Senator George McGovern in Washington, DC, and as an 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.
Biggers earned a B.A. in History/English from Hunter College, with additional study at Columbia University, and the University of California in Berkeley.
He has also appeared on numerous TV and radio programs as a commentator, including MSNBC's All in with Chris Hayes, the Rachel Maddow Show, and Ed Shultz Show, the NBC Nightly News, CNN, Democracy Now, Laura Flander's GRIT TV, and the Thomas Hartmann Show. Biggers has filed several commentaries for National Public Radio's Morning Edition, American Public Radio's Marketplace, and served as a regulator contributor for PRI's Savvy Traveler.
He serves as a contributing editor to The Bloomsbury Review, and is a member of the PEN American Center.
To book Jeff as a speaker, email contactbiggers@gmail.com