Dot Jackson was born to Appalachian parents in Miami in 1932 and gave up her college studies of music and dance to become a writer. She turned an abiding curiosity into a lifelong career in newspapers, where she covered the mountain regions of the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee, going from murder trials to snake-handling prayer meetings to some of the hardest-fought environmental battles of our times.

As an investigative reporter for the Charlotte Observer, she wrote about, and often brought to justice, the industrial polluters whose stories garnered Jackson several Pulitzer Prize nominations and a National Conservation Writer of the Year award. She also has collaborated on several acclaimed books of non-fiction. She is the author of the novel Refuge, published by Novello Festival Press.

Jackson, now 73 and living in Six Mile, S.C., is co-founder and on-site manager of the developing Birchwood Center for Arts and Folklife in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina. She has spent her life exploring the dusty back roads and forgotten hamlets of Appalachia, and still fights to preserve the culture of this threatened region. Her essay about the Warsaw Ballet can be found in Hub City's Stars Fell on Spartanburg (2008).