Robert Gipe
PO Box 1394
Harlan KY 40831
robgipe@icloud.com
606-620-3913
March 2019
Biography
Work History
Since the beginning of 2019, Gipe has been a part-time consultant to the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. From 1997-2018, Robert Gipe was the director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. In that capacity, Gipe connected college and community through the tools of local culture and the arts, and promotes sustainable community development. Gipe also taught English and Appalachian Studies at Southeast.
Since 2002, an oral history-based theater project called Higher Ground has been at the center of Gipe’s work. Through Higher Ground, Gipe has worked with over seven hundred community members in Harlan County to document the issues that face the county, including drug abuse, environmental degradation as a result of mining, lack of jobs, outmigration, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and our lack of willingness as a community to talk through these issues. With the community and guest artists, Gipe has been part of the team that has written and produced seven original musical dramas. Over two hundred community residents have participated as cast. Higher Ground productions have been presented at theater festivals, and conferences at various places in the eastern United States and several locations throughout the community.
In 2016, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's design museum, included Higher Ground in its exhibit By The People, an exhibit about exemplary projects that integrate design into work in communities underserved by design and designers. In 2018, an Eastern Kentucky health care coalition sponsored the creation of the Higher Ground play Needle Work, which was written to help communities discuss harm reduction and needle exchange programs for intravenous drug addicts.
Gipe’s Southeast work has also included facilitating community creation of seven tile mosaic public art pieces around Harlan County; fifteen Crawdad student arts festivals; the creation of a curriculum in Professional Pottery; the It’s Good To Be Young in the Mountains conference, and, for the past fifteen years, the coordination of SKCTC’s participation in the Appalachian Teaching Project. The Appalachian Teaching Project (ATP). ATP is a project supported primarily by the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency of the federal government. ATP brings together students from colleges and universities across the region who have been working in classes on community development projects targeted at specific communities within the mountain region. In 2017, helped secure funding for the Southeast Kentucky Revitalization Project which provide workforce training designed to help the central Appalachian workforce participate in the renovation and re-invention of communities in the region. The project will train Eastern Kentucky workers in the construction trades, the hospitality industry, and design-related trades and connect them with employers and developers in their home communities.
From 1989 to 1995, Gipe worked as Educational Services coordinator at Appalshop, a media arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. At Appalshop, Gipe connected public school teachers to the documentary films in the Appalshop collection, which look at the history, politics, struggle for justice, and cultural life in the Appalachian coalfields and the rest of Appalachia. Gipe designed weeklong workshops that brought dozens of artists together with hundreds of rural public school teachers to learn how to create and make community. Gipe also worked with hundreds of classroom teachers in a participatory research project in partnership with Foxfire and the Breadloaf School of English on how to integrate students’ culture into the curriculum.
From 1995 to 1997, Gipe was a scout for the Annenberg Rural Challenge, a national philanthropic effort that made grants of up to a half million dollars for rural schools interested in connecting their curriculum to the culture of the communities in which they were located. In that job, Gipe worked throughout Appalachia, helping communities in six states craft proposals to the Rural Challenge.
At Appalshop and later at SKCTC, Gipe has been active with the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA). Gipe has presented at the conference in a variety of roles, about graphic design in the mountains, with my fellow Higher Ground cast members, about Higher Ground’s oral history process, presenting Appalshop films, reading fiction, and in various other roles.
Gipe has written successful grant proposals totaling over $5,000,000 including the following: Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, 2017; Appalachian Regional Commission POWER program, 2017; National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant, 2014; The Chorus Foundation, 2013; The Robert E. Frazier Foundation 2013-2015; ArtPlace community development grant, 2012; Appalachian Regional Commission for Tri-Cities Heritage Development Corporation, 2009 & 2010; Appalachian Regional Commission for Higher Ground, 2007; The Steele-Reese Foundation, 2008; John D. Rockefeller Foundation, Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation, 2002; Kentucky Foundation for Women, 1999, 2004; Kentucky Arts Council, 1998-2000; Kentucky Humanities Council, 2000; GEAR-UP, U.S. Department of Education, 1999; Appalachian Teaching Project mini-grants, 2001-present; DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Appalshop School Initiative, 1990; Surdna Foundation, Appalshop, Where Art Meets Ed, 1993; Nathan Cummings Foundation, Appalshop Educational Services, 1991.
Gipe’s work with community-based art as a tool for community development and educational attainment has been discussed in the following books: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008); the Maureen Mullinax essay “Resistance Through Community-based Arts,” in Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia (University of Illinois Press, 2012); and in Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2010). In 2018, Beth Macy wrote about Gipe's work in an article published n The Oxford American and Tommy Tomlinson wrote a profile of Gipe in Wake Forest Magazine. Gipe’s work has also been discussed in the May 14, 2011 New York Times article by Sabrina Tavernise, “Tackling The Problems of Appalachia, Theatrically.”
While Gipe was in graduate school, Gipe had a teaching assistantship, teaching English composition courses. Gipe worked in the university library, and one summer was a spear packer in a pickle factory in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Gipe also worked as a technical writer for the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. As an undergraduate, Gipe worked summers as a forklift driver for Eastman, and for a local print shop in Kingsport.
Publications
Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel, was published by Ohio University Press in 2015. The first six chapters were serialized on Still: The Journal (www.stilljournal.net ) in 2012 and 2013. The Knoxville News-Sentinel called Trampoline “a new American masterpiece.” Library Journal called it “deeply lovable.” The Washington Independent Review of Books called Trampoline “jagged, dark, and honest;” and Dylan Hicks called the novel “ragged but right” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Trampoline is the 2015 Weatherford Award winner for fiction. The Weatherford Awards honor books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities and unique qualities of the Appalachian South,” and is granted by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. One Weatherford fiction judge called Trampoline “an important book for Appalachia, for teachers, for writers, for anyone who cares about the region and the problems facing its youth.” Another judge said, “Trampoline does not take a sentimental or idealized approach to describing Kentucky, but a realistic view of what it is to live in that place.”
Weedeater, Gipe's second novel, was published by Ohio University Press in 2018. The first chapter of Weedeater also appeared in the journal Southern Cultures.
Short fiction Gipe has published includes "Comfort Food," which appeared in Summer 2018 in Gravy, a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, “Troubled Colon,” a short story that appeared in the Appalachian Heritage 40th Anniversary Issue in 2013; “Useless,” which appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, in 2015; “One Good Reason,” in Hidden City Quarterly; and “Dopesick” in The Pikeville Review.
Non-fiction writing includes: "Unsuitable: The Fight to Save Black Mountain, 1998-1999," in Confronting Ecological Crisis in Appalachia and the South: University and Community Partnerships (University of Kentucky Press, 2012). This essay discusses Gipe's community’s effort to protect the highest elevations in Kentucky and the communities nearby from damage related to strip mining. Gipe also wrote the foreword to “Back To Harlan,” in the 2nd edition of Which Side Are You On: The Harlan Coal Miners, 1931-1939 by John Hevener (University of Illinois Press, 2002). While I was Appalshop, I also co-wrote (with high school teacher Ann Messer) "Twixt the Holler and the Mall: Appalshop Video in an Eastern Kentucky Classroom," which was published in the Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society in 1992.
Gipe’s master’s thesis is entitled Zone Defense: The Rhetoric of the Outsider in the Art-Worlds of Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell. Gipe completed it in 1988, while he was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts.
Teaching Experience
Gipe has taught the following courses: English 101 & 102; Survey of Appalachian Studies I & II; Appalachian Seminar; Survey of Appalachian Literature; Introduction to Contemporary Thought; American Seminar; and Craft Marketing.
Reading & Writing Experience
Gipe has attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky times since 2006. In so doing, Gipe has taken creative writing workshops with, among others, Jennifer Haigh, Sharyn McCrumb, Lisa Alther, Silas House, Amy Greene, Crystal Wilkinson, Marie Manilla, David Joy, George Singleton, and Ann Pancake. For four of those years, Gipe has introduced the writers at the evening readings, and in so doing, has done a fair amount of research into the lives of the writers listed above and others such as Gurney Norman, Maurice Manning, Barbara Kingsolver, Nikki Finney, Pam Duncan, Charles Dodd White, Jesse Graves, Glenn Taylor, Alex Taylor, C. Michael Curtis, Elizabeth Cox, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Mark Powell, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and George Ella Lyon.
In 2010 and 2011, Gipe took an extended novel workshop with Darnell Arnoult. Over eighteen months, Gipe spent six weekends with Arnoult creating the first draft of a novel that would be published in 2015 by Ohio University Press as Trampoline. Gipe also worked with Arnoult and others as part of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival as both participant, reader, and workshop leader. Gipe has also taught at the Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop.
Gipe was chosen to be one of the writers to present at the Appalachian Writers Symposium in Berea in September 2015. Gipe was a participating author at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, the Books by the Banks literary festival in Cincinnati, and the Kentucky Book Fair in Fall 2015. Gipe read and spoke at the Oxford (MS) Festival of the Book, and the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Weslyan University. Gipe has also been writer-in-residence at Furman University in the summer of 2018, and is scheduled to teach novel writing at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in summer of 2019.
Gipe has given readings of his work at Taylor Books in Charleston, WV; Union Avenue Books in Knoxville; the Holler Poet series in Lexington; The Morris Book Shop in Lexington; the Pages and Pints reading series in Richmond, Kentucky; the Highlands Literary Festival at Radford University; the Appalachian Studies Association annual conference; Thomas More University; Appalshop’s Seedtime on the Cumberland festival in Whitesburg, Kentucky; the It’s Good To Be Young in the Mountains conference in Harlan, Kentucky, and the University of Pikeville. More information on Gipe's readings can be found on the Where RG? page on this website.
Gipe’s Trampoline has been adopted as a text for courses at West Virginia University, Thomas More University, Hazard Community College, the University of Kentucky, Emory & Henry College, the East Tennessee State University Upward Bound program, Stetson University, and Virginia Tech, among other places, and Gipe has spoken with students and faculty at most of those places as part of their course work.
An interview Gipe did with author Ann Pancake was published in the Winter 2011 issue of Appalachian Journal. Appalachian Journal also published Gipe’s review of Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia: A Novel in the Spring/Summer 2013 issue and gipe reviewed Appalachia in the Classroom, a collection of essays edited by Theresa Burriss and Patricia Gantt for the Fall 2014 issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Burriss and Gantt’s collection includes several essays about the teaching of literature. A review of Pancake’s short fiction collection Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley appeared in Appalachian Journal.
Honors received
While working as director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, I won the following awards: President’s Award, Harlan Chamber of Commerce, 2013; East Kentucky Leadership Foundation, Arts & Culture Award (for the community performance project Higher Ground), 2013; and the New Horizons Award for Faculty Excellence, Kentucky Community & Technical College System, 2004.
PO Box 1394
Harlan KY 40831
robgipe@icloud.com
606-620-3913
March 2019
Biography
Work History
Since the beginning of 2019, Gipe has been a part-time consultant to the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. From 1997-2018, Robert Gipe was the director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College. In that capacity, Gipe connected college and community through the tools of local culture and the arts, and promotes sustainable community development. Gipe also taught English and Appalachian Studies at Southeast.
Since 2002, an oral history-based theater project called Higher Ground has been at the center of Gipe’s work. Through Higher Ground, Gipe has worked with over seven hundred community members in Harlan County to document the issues that face the county, including drug abuse, environmental degradation as a result of mining, lack of jobs, outmigration, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and our lack of willingness as a community to talk through these issues. With the community and guest artists, Gipe has been part of the team that has written and produced seven original musical dramas. Over two hundred community residents have participated as cast. Higher Ground productions have been presented at theater festivals, and conferences at various places in the eastern United States and several locations throughout the community.
In 2016, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's design museum, included Higher Ground in its exhibit By The People, an exhibit about exemplary projects that integrate design into work in communities underserved by design and designers. In 2018, an Eastern Kentucky health care coalition sponsored the creation of the Higher Ground play Needle Work, which was written to help communities discuss harm reduction and needle exchange programs for intravenous drug addicts.
Gipe’s Southeast work has also included facilitating community creation of seven tile mosaic public art pieces around Harlan County; fifteen Crawdad student arts festivals; the creation of a curriculum in Professional Pottery; the It’s Good To Be Young in the Mountains conference, and, for the past fifteen years, the coordination of SKCTC’s participation in the Appalachian Teaching Project. The Appalachian Teaching Project (ATP). ATP is a project supported primarily by the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency of the federal government. ATP brings together students from colleges and universities across the region who have been working in classes on community development projects targeted at specific communities within the mountain region. In 2017, helped secure funding for the Southeast Kentucky Revitalization Project which provide workforce training designed to help the central Appalachian workforce participate in the renovation and re-invention of communities in the region. The project will train Eastern Kentucky workers in the construction trades, the hospitality industry, and design-related trades and connect them with employers and developers in their home communities.
From 1989 to 1995, Gipe worked as Educational Services coordinator at Appalshop, a media arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky. At Appalshop, Gipe connected public school teachers to the documentary films in the Appalshop collection, which look at the history, politics, struggle for justice, and cultural life in the Appalachian coalfields and the rest of Appalachia. Gipe designed weeklong workshops that brought dozens of artists together with hundreds of rural public school teachers to learn how to create and make community. Gipe also worked with hundreds of classroom teachers in a participatory research project in partnership with Foxfire and the Breadloaf School of English on how to integrate students’ culture into the curriculum.
From 1995 to 1997, Gipe was a scout for the Annenberg Rural Challenge, a national philanthropic effort that made grants of up to a half million dollars for rural schools interested in connecting their curriculum to the culture of the communities in which they were located. In that job, Gipe worked throughout Appalachia, helping communities in six states craft proposals to the Rural Challenge.
At Appalshop and later at SKCTC, Gipe has been active with the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA). Gipe has presented at the conference in a variety of roles, about graphic design in the mountains, with my fellow Higher Ground cast members, about Higher Ground’s oral history process, presenting Appalshop films, reading fiction, and in various other roles.
Gipe has written successful grant proposals totaling over $5,000,000 including the following: Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, 2017; Appalachian Regional Commission POWER program, 2017; National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant, 2014; The Chorus Foundation, 2013; The Robert E. Frazier Foundation 2013-2015; ArtPlace community development grant, 2012; Appalachian Regional Commission for Tri-Cities Heritage Development Corporation, 2009 & 2010; Appalachian Regional Commission for Higher Ground, 2007; The Steele-Reese Foundation, 2008; John D. Rockefeller Foundation, Partnerships Affirming Community Transformation, 2002; Kentucky Foundation for Women, 1999, 2004; Kentucky Arts Council, 1998-2000; Kentucky Humanities Council, 2000; GEAR-UP, U.S. Department of Education, 1999; Appalachian Teaching Project mini-grants, 2001-present; DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, Appalshop School Initiative, 1990; Surdna Foundation, Appalshop, Where Art Meets Ed, 1993; Nathan Cummings Foundation, Appalshop Educational Services, 1991.
Gipe’s work with community-based art as a tool for community development and educational attainment has been discussed in the following books: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008); the Maureen Mullinax essay “Resistance Through Community-based Arts,” in Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia (University of Illinois Press, 2012); and in Alessandro Portelli’s They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford University Press, 2010). In 2018, Beth Macy wrote about Gipe's work in an article published n The Oxford American and Tommy Tomlinson wrote a profile of Gipe in Wake Forest Magazine. Gipe’s work has also been discussed in the May 14, 2011 New York Times article by Sabrina Tavernise, “Tackling The Problems of Appalachia, Theatrically.”
While Gipe was in graduate school, Gipe had a teaching assistantship, teaching English composition courses. Gipe worked in the university library, and one summer was a spear packer in a pickle factory in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. Gipe also worked as a technical writer for the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. As an undergraduate, Gipe worked summers as a forklift driver for Eastman, and for a local print shop in Kingsport.
Publications
Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel, was published by Ohio University Press in 2015. The first six chapters were serialized on Still: The Journal (www.stilljournal.net ) in 2012 and 2013. The Knoxville News-Sentinel called Trampoline “a new American masterpiece.” Library Journal called it “deeply lovable.” The Washington Independent Review of Books called Trampoline “jagged, dark, and honest;” and Dylan Hicks called the novel “ragged but right” in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Trampoline is the 2015 Weatherford Award winner for fiction. The Weatherford Awards honor books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities and unique qualities of the Appalachian South,” and is granted by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. One Weatherford fiction judge called Trampoline “an important book for Appalachia, for teachers, for writers, for anyone who cares about the region and the problems facing its youth.” Another judge said, “Trampoline does not take a sentimental or idealized approach to describing Kentucky, but a realistic view of what it is to live in that place.”
Weedeater, Gipe's second novel, was published by Ohio University Press in 2018. The first chapter of Weedeater also appeared in the journal Southern Cultures.
Short fiction Gipe has published includes "Comfort Food," which appeared in Summer 2018 in Gravy, a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, “Troubled Colon,” a short story that appeared in the Appalachian Heritage 40th Anniversary Issue in 2013; “Useless,” which appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, in 2015; “One Good Reason,” in Hidden City Quarterly; and “Dopesick” in The Pikeville Review.
Non-fiction writing includes: "Unsuitable: The Fight to Save Black Mountain, 1998-1999," in Confronting Ecological Crisis in Appalachia and the South: University and Community Partnerships (University of Kentucky Press, 2012). This essay discusses Gipe's community’s effort to protect the highest elevations in Kentucky and the communities nearby from damage related to strip mining. Gipe also wrote the foreword to “Back To Harlan,” in the 2nd edition of Which Side Are You On: The Harlan Coal Miners, 1931-1939 by John Hevener (University of Illinois Press, 2002). While I was Appalshop, I also co-wrote (with high school teacher Ann Messer) "Twixt the Holler and the Mall: Appalshop Video in an Eastern Kentucky Classroom," which was published in the Proceedings of the Southern Anthropological Society in 1992.
Gipe’s master’s thesis is entitled Zone Defense: The Rhetoric of the Outsider in the Art-Worlds of Emily Dickinson and Joseph Cornell. Gipe completed it in 1988, while he was a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts.
Teaching Experience
Gipe has taught the following courses: English 101 & 102; Survey of Appalachian Studies I & II; Appalachian Seminar; Survey of Appalachian Literature; Introduction to Contemporary Thought; American Seminar; and Craft Marketing.
Reading & Writing Experience
Gipe has attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky times since 2006. In so doing, Gipe has taken creative writing workshops with, among others, Jennifer Haigh, Sharyn McCrumb, Lisa Alther, Silas House, Amy Greene, Crystal Wilkinson, Marie Manilla, David Joy, George Singleton, and Ann Pancake. For four of those years, Gipe has introduced the writers at the evening readings, and in so doing, has done a fair amount of research into the lives of the writers listed above and others such as Gurney Norman, Maurice Manning, Barbara Kingsolver, Nikki Finney, Pam Duncan, Charles Dodd White, Jesse Graves, Glenn Taylor, Alex Taylor, C. Michael Curtis, Elizabeth Cox, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Mark Powell, Gwyn Hyman Rubio, and George Ella Lyon.
In 2010 and 2011, Gipe took an extended novel workshop with Darnell Arnoult. Over eighteen months, Gipe spent six weekends with Arnoult creating the first draft of a novel that would be published in 2015 by Ohio University Press as Trampoline. Gipe also worked with Arnoult and others as part of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival as both participant, reader, and workshop leader. Gipe has also taught at the Tennessee Young Writers’ Workshop.
Gipe was chosen to be one of the writers to present at the Appalachian Writers Symposium in Berea in September 2015. Gipe was a participating author at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, the Books by the Banks literary festival in Cincinnati, and the Kentucky Book Fair in Fall 2015. Gipe read and spoke at the Oxford (MS) Festival of the Book, and the low-residency MFA program at West Virginia Weslyan University. Gipe has also been writer-in-residence at Furman University in the summer of 2018, and is scheduled to teach novel writing at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School in summer of 2019.
Gipe has given readings of his work at Taylor Books in Charleston, WV; Union Avenue Books in Knoxville; the Holler Poet series in Lexington; The Morris Book Shop in Lexington; the Pages and Pints reading series in Richmond, Kentucky; the Highlands Literary Festival at Radford University; the Appalachian Studies Association annual conference; Thomas More University; Appalshop’s Seedtime on the Cumberland festival in Whitesburg, Kentucky; the It’s Good To Be Young in the Mountains conference in Harlan, Kentucky, and the University of Pikeville. More information on Gipe's readings can be found on the Where RG? page on this website.
Gipe’s Trampoline has been adopted as a text for courses at West Virginia University, Thomas More University, Hazard Community College, the University of Kentucky, Emory & Henry College, the East Tennessee State University Upward Bound program, Stetson University, and Virginia Tech, among other places, and Gipe has spoken with students and faculty at most of those places as part of their course work.
An interview Gipe did with author Ann Pancake was published in the Winter 2011 issue of Appalachian Journal. Appalachian Journal also published Gipe’s review of Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia: A Novel in the Spring/Summer 2013 issue and gipe reviewed Appalachia in the Classroom, a collection of essays edited by Theresa Burriss and Patricia Gantt for the Fall 2014 issue of the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Burriss and Gantt’s collection includes several essays about the teaching of literature. A review of Pancake’s short fiction collection Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley appeared in Appalachian Journal.
Honors received
While working as director of the Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, I won the following awards: President’s Award, Harlan Chamber of Commerce, 2013; East Kentucky Leadership Foundation, Arts & Culture Award (for the community performance project Higher Ground), 2013; and the New Horizons Award for Faculty Excellence, Kentucky Community & Technical College System, 2004.
Proudly powered by Weebly