Name: The Mine Wars with Steve Watkins
Start: 2025-01-28T12:00:00-05:00
Location: Lunch With Books at the Ohio County Public Library

The Great West Virginia Mine Wars of 1920 are unknown to most Americans, according to author Steve Watkins in this relevant and enlightening read. Forced to work 10- to 12-hour days in unsafe conditions under the brutal treatment of a violent guard system for credits, or scrip pay only usable at their employer’s store, West Virginia miners attempted to unionize. The mine owners and state government responded by hiring local lawmen and “gun thugs” from Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the mine guard company, to union-bust by terrorizing the workers; the gun thugs beat the employees and destroyed their homes, and the owners brought in hundreds of scabs to work the dormant mines. But the striking miners fought back, “igniting the greatest armed insurrection in America since the Civil War,” a yearlong conflict that only ended when federal troops were sent in. In spare and honest text, Watkins explains that the Mine Wars were a part of history that was not just overlooked but intentionally buried by “the powers that be in West Virginia, the coal owners and their politicians, [who] ran a deliberate disinformation campaign.” (from Publisher's Weekly)
Bio of Steve Watkins
I am the author of 15 books, most of them novels for young readers. My newest, WOLVES at the DOOR (Scholastic, December 2024), is a historical novel about two sisters in East Prussia, fighting to survive at the end of WWII as the Red Army turns the tide of war–exacting revenge on the first German state they encounter and leaving tens of thousands of children orphaned and abandoned. These children, the sisters among them, became known as Wolfskinder, or Wolf Children, and this is their story.
Another recent historical novel, STOLEN by NIGHT, published by Scholastic in November 2023, is about teenagers in the Resistance in Occupied Paris during WWII, and the one Nazi-run concentration camp on what is now French soil.
A nonfiction book for young readers that I researched and wrote for Bloomsbury Press–The Mine Wars: The Bloody Fight for Workers’ Right in the West Virginia Coal Fields–was published in May 2024 and tells the long-buried story of the West Virginia Coal Mine Wars of the 1920s and the labor organizers and union men who made it all happen.
My historical novel ON BLOOD ROAD (Scholastic, 2019) is set during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, and tells the story of a kidnapped American teenager–spirited away from everything and everyone he knows and taken up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to a North Vietnamese prison.
I’m also the author of the middle-grade novel SINK OR SWIM, which was inspired by a true story and was published in fall 2017 by Scholastic. Set at the start of the Second World War, Sink or Swim explores the battle in the North Atlantic against the German U-Boats that terrorized the East Coast of the U.S.–and a 13-year-old boy who managed to enlist in the Navy to fight them.
With my wife Janet, I’m co-founder and editor of a free, monthly, online feature magazine, Pie & Chai. You can also follow Pie & Chai on Facebook for announcements and updates:
Other books I’ve written include:
GREAT FALLS, published in fall 2016 by Candlewick Press, a post-Iraq and -Afghanistan War story about the challenges to returning veterans and their families.
JUVIE, from 2014, also from Candlewick, which explores the troubled and challenging world of juvenile incarceration.
The four-book GHOSTS OF WAR series from Scholastic about an intrepid trio of sixth graders living in Fredericksburg, VA, solving war mysteries, starting a band, and trying to survive middle school.
Another Young Adult novel, WHAT COMES AFTER, named by Bank Street College as one of the best YA books of 2012, and selected as a finalist for the Georgia Peach Award for YA Fiction.
An autobiographical novel, DOWN SAND MOUNTAIN, about growing up in the 60s in the segregated, semi-rural South, which won the 2009 Golden Kite Award for Fiction from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
A short story collection, My Chaos Theory(2006, Southern Methodist University Press), which was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and an Honorable Mention for the Library of Virginia Fiction Award.
The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire,a nonfiction book published by the University of Georgia Press, which tells the story of the largest employment discrimination class action lawsuit in U.S. history. The Black O won the 1997 Virginia College Stores Book Award, was an honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Award, and was a finalist for the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award for Nonfiction.
My fiction, poetry, and non-fiction articles have also appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Poets & Writers, Mississippi Review, 100 Percent Pure Florida Fiction, North American Review and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.
I graduated with my Ph.D. from Florida State University in 1990, and taught journalism, creative writing, and Vietnam War literature at the University of Mary Washington for 22 years. After leaving academia in 2012, I opened, managed, and taught at a couple of yoga studios, one a nonprofit serving a variety of underserved communities. I’ve also worked with abused and neglected children and teens as a volunteer with Court Appointed Child Advocates, and as a Tree Steward and staff member for the urban reforestation organization Tree Fredericksburg. From 2017 until Covid, I taught English literature and writing, mostly 12th grade International Baccalaureate classes, at Mountain View High School in Stafford, VA.