Short Bio

Cathy Rigg was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia where her people, on her mother’s side, go back generations. She moved to South Carolina after college and founded the brand marketing firm, Riggs Partners. Rigg’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, Still: the Journal, Clinch Mountain Review, and other publications. She and her husband divide their time between Columbia, SC, and Burnsville, NC, where they stare at the view and obsess over the bears on a ridge high above Asheville.

Long Bio

Cathy Rigg is an author and blogger whose roots run deep in the soil of Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains. It’s where her people come from on her mother’s side, going back seven generations, and since moving away Cathy swears those ancestors call to her, insisting their stories be told. 

It’s something she can hardly resist. She’s been a writer and entrepreneur all her life, beginning with a neighborhood newspaper she co-created when she was eight years old. She followed this with a flurry of original but (no doubt) terrible short stories, then by high school Cathy had a job at the Lonesome Pine Regional Library where the very best part of work she loved was getting to sort books and shelve them. To this day she remembers coming across Lee Smith’s The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, reading the first page and declaring to her parents: “I want to be a writer. And I want to write books like this.”

Cathy left the mountains to study English in South Carolina’s foothills, at Clemson University. She later landed a summer journalism internship at The Coalfield Progress—an opportunity that brought her back home for a time and that surrounded her with swirl of talented, supportive mentors. After graduation she set her sights on a career as an advertising copywriter. She founded the ad studio C. C. Rigg’s at the age of 27—and now, 38 years later—the firm known as Riggs Partners serves clients across the country. 

In recent years Cathy has returned to creative writing. She launched The Daily Grace blog in 2013, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Still: The Journal; Women Speak: An Anthology of Women of Appalachia Project; litmosphere: journal of CharlotteLit; These Mosaics poetry anthology; Stafford Challenge 2024 Anthology; Clinch Mountain Review; and a short story, “Stone Cold,” was a finalist in both the Lit/South and Doris Betts Fiction Prize contests. Cathy has recently published her first novel, THAT WHICH BINDS US (Keylight Books, June 2025), a work of historical fiction centered around five people whose lives intersect during the tumultuous years of the Civil War. The story is set deep in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.