Ann Pancake – Keynote Speaker
Ann Pancake is an award-winning Appalachian author and educator whose creative work explores the intersection of people and the environment. Her first novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007), was a 2008 Orion Magazine Book Award finalist and winner of the Weatherford Award for best book about Appalachia. She has also written two collections of short stories Given Ground (2001) and Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (2015). Her writing is celebrated for its innovative and accurate depiction regional dialects and the detailed portraits she creates of the characters in her stories.
All of her work has been set in West Virginia and tackles issues related to environmental, social, and economic challenges people and communities face in many parts of rural Appalachia. Pancake earned a MA from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She currently teaches at her alma mater West Virginia University where she is a professor in the department of english and writer in residence. She has been selected as the 2023 Appalachian Heritage Writer in Residence at Shepherd College and Strange as This Weather Has Been has been chosen as the One Book One West Virginia Common Reading.
Elaine McMillion Sheldon
Elaine McMillion Sheldon is an Academy-Award nominated documentary filmmaker whose powerful storytelling brings the lives and experiences of people and places in rural settings out of obscurity and into focus, rendering those that have been invisible, visible and shining lights on injustice whether it is the toll exacted on the lives of coal miners in the form of the deadly black lung disease or the challenge of overcoming opioid addiction. Her short documentary Heroin(e), nominated for an Oscar and winner of the 2018 News and Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Short Documentary followed Jan Rader, chief of the Huntington, West Virginia fire department as she worked save her community from the ravages of the opioid epidemic. Her latest project, King Coal, explores the central Appalachian region, its relationship to the coal industry, and the cultural connections to coal mining in order to imagine a future beyond coal. She is a West Virginia native and holds a bachelor’s degree from WVU and an MFA from Emerson College.
Anthony Aveni
Anthony Aveni is the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology and Native American Studies, Emeritus at Colgate University. His groundbreaking research focused what the Maya knew about the night sky and the ways it influenced their culture contributed to the development of the discipline of archeoastronomy. He is also widely recognized as one of the founders and world’s foremost experts on Mesoamerican archeoastronomy. He is author of numerous books and research articles on the subject, which include seminal works such as People and the Sky, Conversing with the Planets, Empires of Time, and In the Shadow of the Moon: The Science, Magic, and Mystery of Solar Eclipses. His research has been featured as the cover articles in Science magazine on three separate occasions.
Crystal Good
Crystal Good is a writer-poet, producer, artist, advocate, performer, and founder of Black by God the West Virginian, a community-led news organization which centers the experiences of Black Appalachians. In 2012, she published Valley Girl, her first book of poetry dealing with issues from quantum physics to mountaintop removal mining. She is regular TedX presenter having given talks titled “West Virginia and Quantum Physics: Small Things Matter” and “Black Diamonds, Civil Up and Rising.” In March 2023, Bon Appetit magazine published her “itinerary for a dream road trip through the Mountain State” to gain a deeper understanding of Appalachian foodways and traditions.
Richard Stedman
Richard Stedman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, where he also is Associate Director of the Center for Conservation Social Sciences and a member of the Graduate Field of Development Sociology.
Stedman’s research, teaching, and outreach is rooted in social-ecological systems. He is especially interested in sense of place—as the meanings and attachments that are held for particular landscapes—and the role of environmental quality in underpinning this connection.
His research addresses connection to place and to community and how these connections may be affected by rapid social and ecological change. As a sociologist who takes the natural world seriously, he believes that place matters, even in this age of extraordinary mobility. For Stedman, our environmental behaviors—from stewardship, to politics, to consumer choices–are rooted in our experiences, our understandings of, and preferences for places we care about. He studies a wide range of these places, at multiple scales, facing a diverse array of challenges, including wildlife conflict, invasive species, energy development, climate change, migration, and many others.
James Lowenthal
James Lowenthal is professor of astronomy at Smith College and has been involved in dark sky preservation work for decades. He is the Past Vice-President of the IAU’s Inter-Division B-C Commission Protection of Existing and Potential Observatory Sites and Past Vice-President of the American Astronomic Society. His research interests in astronomy focus on the formation and evolution of galaxies and includes the study of high-redshift galaxies, starburst galaxies, and quasars.
He is a tireless advocate of dark skies, working in his local community of Northampton and the state of Massachusetts as well as taking leadership roles with the national and international efforts to reduce light pollution and preserve dark night skies across the planet.
Perry Ground
Perry Ground is a Turtle Clan member of the Onondaga Nation and has been telling stories for more than 25 years as a way of educating people about the culture, beliefs and history of the Haudenosaunee (sometimes known as Iroquois) Confederacy. As part of the star party planned for Friday night, he will join us to share indigenous stories and knowledge that are recorded in the night sky.
Becky Hill
Becky Hill is a percussive dancer, square dancer caller, choreographer, community organizer, and educator. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland. She has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Newport Folk Festival, the Mountain Stage, the Augusta Heritage Center, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Country Music Hall of Fame just to name a few. She has served as Artist in Residence at Davis & Elkins College where she coordinated The Mountain Dance Trail of the Augusta Heritage Center and co-directed the Appalachian Ensemble. Becky will both give a presentation during the symposium as well as perform and be the caller for the square dance on Saturday night.
