"Jeff Biggers" is an American author, journalist, playwright, and performance artist. He is the author of four books, and co-editor of a fifth. His last book, "State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream," came out in the fall of 2012. Selected as a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Title in Social Science, "State Out of the Union" was praised by Kirkus Reviews as "masterful at showing how the past is prologue…A timely book, especially with immigration policy playing a major role in the upcoming presidential campaign.”

Biggers is a frequent performer and speaker at festivals, theatres, conferences, universities and schools across the country.

As the grandson of a coal mining/coal miner from southern Illinois, Jeff Biggers has been a vocal critic of Mountaintop removal mining/mountaintop removal in Appalachia and reckless strip mining across the nation, as well as poorly enforced black lung disease/black lung and mining workplace safety laws, and the fallacy of "clean coal" slogans. Reckoning at Eagle Creek examines the loss of his family's 200-year-old homestead to strip mining, and the historical parallel impact of coal mining on communities and their environment.

More Jeff Biggers on Wikipedia.

The whole point is why the mountains, the land, still determines our culture. The mountains sort of drive how we live.

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It's not just a backwoods of white, lanky mountaineers. In fact, it's been much more of a crossroads of integration and coming together of many different cultures there.

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I found myself in the South. I got picked up by somebody and made a joke about how dangerous it is to hitchhike with hillbillies. He told me to get out.

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My whole thesis is that you can't understand America until you understand Appalachia.

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To me the clash of that culture is the beauty of Appalachia.

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We need to try to live in sync with our geography.

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America does need to come up to the mountains to deal with some issues.

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