Author PJ Piccirillo will discuss his research into African American pioneer history in northcentral Pennsylvania. Piccirillo spent four years preparing his historical novel The Indigo Scarf.

This acclaimed and award-winning book is set in and around Pennsylvania’s present-day Cameron, Clinton, and Lycoming counties during the early 19th century. The novel has sparked conversation not only about the slave experience in rural northern Appalachia but also the struggles of generations of African Americans after emancipation and the travails of pioneer life, specifically Pennsylvania Black pioneer life.

Based on the true story of two escaped slaves who fled their owners with white women into the wilderness of the Allegheny Plateau, The Indigo Scarf interprets how slavery persisted in the north during the nineteenth century. Meticulously researched, the work is informed by Pennsylvania historians; scholars in early American slave laws and northern black codes; experts in post-colonial folkways; and by descendants who live to this day in the fugitive Pennsylvania settlement their forbears established. The Indigo Scarf relates the covert workings of sympathetic Quakers, the ruthlessness of a slave catcher, and the irony of a Revolutionary War veteran forced to face his daughter’s love for the slave Jedediah James. The novel treats the deeper theme of the spirit-breaking impact slavery has had across generations since abolition.

During the session, Piccirillo will share suppressed regional history he uncovered and how his research connected figures and events from two centuries ago, as well as how the book has been received by the African American community. He invites discussion on all aspects of the book and audience reaction.

PJ Piccirillo, who holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, is an author, editor, and adjunct (Butler County Community College). He is a regular presenter in the humanities, having worked for 19 years as a Literary Resident Artist for the PA Council on the Arts, and as a literary scholar for the PA Humanities Council. Piccirillo is founder of the WCoNA Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia® and The Northern Appalachia Review, for which he is editor-in-chief.