Much of Pancake's writing also focuses on the destruction caused by natural resource extraction, particularly in Appalachia, and the lives of the people affected.
[1] Pancake believes that people from the Appalachian region of the United States have many qualities that the rest of Americans don't have, but should - such as the art of storytelling.
[1] Though her West-Virginian heritage spans seven generations back, Pancake was born in Richmond, Virginia, where her father was enrolled in seminary at the time.
[3] When she was eighteen, Ann Pancake moved from Romney and attended West Virginia University, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English.
[5] Pancake found West Virginia University to be a "culture shock" as there were a large number of out-of-state students at the time.
[3] Due to low employment rates in West Virginia, after graduating, Pancake left the state and started to teach in various countries in Asia and the South Pacific.
in English from the University of North Carolina, writing her master's thesis on Samoan writer Albert Wendt, using postcolonial theory.
She later earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, where her driving dissertation question was "how Americans sustain their delusion that we have essentially a classless society given the glaring economic disparity in this country.
[3] Her time outside of the East Coast and the United States formed her understanding of Appalachia, and helped her see the value in the region she came from.
Dirt chronicles a family's reflection of a son taught to burrow shafts in the Vietnam War, and the entrapment and dread that this environment echoes for them at home.
While some critics have chosen to place Pancake firmly in the tradition of Appalachian writing,[7] her stories describe more than regional color, history, and concerns.
Her work also appears in the collection LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts.
[11] Pancake gave a reading of this novel at the Washington State Art Museum where she was a part of the Meet The Artist Fellowship.
[4] Ann provided some initial research and interview assistance for the film Black Diamonds: Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice (2006).
[14] For a discussion of the themes, geography, and production of this film, see Bret McCabe's article Tragic Mountains from the Baltimore City Paper.