Humanities Tennessee announced that Franklin author Jared Sullivan is the winner of the 2025 Tennessee Book Awards in nonfiction for his Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe.
Published to wide acclaim in October, Valley So Low (Knopf) concerns one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history, at a power plant in Kingston, Tennessee, operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Sullivan, a Franklin High graduate and a former editor for Field & Stream and Men’s Journal, spent five years writing and reporting the book.
“I’m honored that Valley So Low received this incredible award,” Sullivan said. “I wrote the book to show how anti-worker legislation and backward environmental policies can wreck the lives of everyday Tennesseans, and I’m forever grateful that the Kingston cleanup workers trusted me to tell their story to that end.”
Humanities Tennessee is the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A statewide panel of teachers, librarians, and HT board members reviewed submissions for the Tennessee Book Awards and selected three finalists in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. The celebrated author Chris Offutt was the finalist judge for nonfiction. “Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Valley So Low is a crucial book for these uncertain times,” Offutt said. “Everyone should read it.”
Valley So Low was previously named one of the best books of the year by Garden & Gun and The New Yorker, and it was reviewed favorably by The New York Times.
The book details how, in 2008, a holding pond at a TVA power plant collapsed, spewing a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge over 300 acres outside Knoxville. The resulting cleanup effort cost over $1 billion — and the lives of 50 cleanup workers who were denied access to protective gear while remediating the site.
In reporting Valley So Low, Sullivan closely followed the cleanup workers and their lawyers, who spent a decade battling a TVA contractor in court. Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove, was among those who praised Sullivan’s effort: “Valley So Low is a gripping legal thriller documenting the power and greed behind this appalling and deadly environmental disaster. Not since Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action has a book so compellingly documented one man’s Herculean efforts to force accountability through the courts.”
Vic Sizemore, of Maryville, won in the fiction category for God of River Mud. Didi Jackson, of Nashville, won in poetry for My Infinity: Poems.
The award recipient in each category will receive a cash prize of $2,500 and will be recognized at community events in their hometowns. Only authors who live in Tennessee and who published their books in the calendar year 2024 were eligible.
Sullivan says he feels deeply indebted to his teachers at Franklin High School, where he was the newspaper editor-in-chief and student-body president in 2009. “My entire life has been shaped by my time at FHS,” he said. “It was there that I learned the basics of journalism and where I first fell in love with books — like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I was assigned in 11th-grade English and which utterly changed the trajectory of my life.”
Sullivan began his career at Field & Stream, in New York City. He and his family returned to Franklin in 2020. “Tennessee is a beautiful state full of delightful people,” Sullivan said. “I’m glad to be writing and raising my children here. But the great tragedy, in my view, is that our state government does almost nothing to help everyday Tennesseans, like the blue-collar workers I write about in Valley So Low.”
He said he hopes his book, and others like it on state issues, encourages the public to demand more from their state and federal representatives. “Nationally, Tennessee ranks high in childhood poverty, high in crime, high in medical debt, and high in uninsured rates,” Sullivan added. “On the flip side, we rank low in life expectancy, low in median household income, and low in educational attainment. These are all the results of policy choices, and we, as Tennesseans, should insist on better.”
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