Nancy Jane Giles was bred-and-buttered in Big Stone Gap, a small, historical, coal town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, in the year when ‘most everybody liked Ike. The siren call of higher education lured her from her mountain home to some dandy North Carolina schools—Saint Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Appalachian State University in Boone, where she somehow (as best she can recall) managed to eke out a Master’s Degree in Appalachian Studies. But it’s quite possible that the education she got from soaking up stories of the southwest VA, western NC, and upper east TN towns in which she’s lived the bulk of her 71 years has been of equal, if not greater, value.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to learn-by-doing, Nancy Jane has (among other things) taught school at every level, preschool through college, directed plays and choirs, been an Assisted Living Activities Director, led jams and taught oldtime string band classes, dispatched trucks, been a Director of Christian Education, operated a tearoom, written newspaper feature articles, been a Cultural Interpreter for a state park, spent one memorable summer as a paralegal, after which she decided that law school might not be for her, and waited more tables than you could shake a stick at. Her love for history, storytelling, and music was early on nurtured by her collusion with “The Tale Twisters” tandem storytellers, and currently finds a conduit in the Celtalachian trio “Thistle Dew” and the jazz duo “Tub Butter,” as well as in the writing of this, her first novel—an occurrence which will hopefully offer respite to her long-suffering friends who have strongly advised her to quit talking about writing a book and just DEW IT!
These days Nancy Jane can be found happily-ever-aftering with her husband Michael and their mutual best friend, a Silver Lab named Jazzy Blue Giles, in Johnson “Little City,” Tennessee.
