|
|
||
|
|
||
 |
Sheila
Kay Adams (novelist,
ballad singer, storyteller)
Adams shares stories of characters and events from the small mountain community in western North Carolina where she was born, and passes on the rich musical heritage of her ancestors. A seventh generation ballad singer, she is also an award-winning author. Her book of short stories, Come Go Home With Me, was a winner of the North Carolina Historical Award for Historical Fiction, and her novel, My Old True Love, was a finalist for the Southeastern Booksellers Association 2004 Book of the Year Award. More Information |
|
| Dr.
Lloyd Bailey (historian,
professor)
Born in Yancey in 1936, Dr. Bailey taught for 28 years in the divinity school of Duke University, and is (in retirement) professor of religion at Mount Olive College and Methodist College. He has published five large volumes of the series Heritage of Toe River Valley and has four more in preparation. As an authority on the history and genealogy of the Toe River Valley (the counties of Avery, Mitchell, and Yancey in Western North Carolina) he has published several other volumes: History of the Methodist Church in the Toe River Valley, History of the Bailey family of Yancey County and News from Yancey among others. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Bill Brooks (novelist,
closet poet)
Before turning pro in 1992 with his first novel, Brooks spent 16 years in the Health Care profession in the midwest. Prior to that he had the typical writer's background, having worked a plethora of jobs including shoe salesman, shipyard laborer, factory worker, and gas station attendant and journalist. While Brooks publishes mostly western novels, he is most proud of his non-western novels, The Stone Garden, Pretty Boy, and Bonnie & Clyde: A Love Story. In the last several years he has begun to teach creative writing in various venues, including, last year a week at the famed Chautauqua Institute. More Information |
|
| Kathryn
Stripling Byer (poet,
essayist)
Coming To Rest, Byer's fifth book of poetry, is due out in April 2006. Also published are Catching Light (2002); Black Shawl (1998); Wildwood Flower (1992), which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), which was published in the Associated Writing Programs award series. Among her other accolades are the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize, the Brockman-Campbell Award, and appointment as Poet Laureate of North Carolina. She lives in Cullowhee, located in the western mountains of the state. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Gary Carden (playwright,
storyteller, writer)
Carden’s latest success, a one-man-show entitled The Prince of Dark Corners (performed by Milton Higgins of Burnsville) has been filmed by Heritage Films (filmmaker, Neal Hutcheson) and is scheduled for broadcast by PBS. Carden’s other dramatic works include The Raindrop Waltz and a series of dramatic monologues, including Nance Dude, Birdell and Coy. Mason Jars in the Flood received the Appalachian Writers Association Award for Book of the Year (200l) and his video, “Blow the Tannery Whistle” filmed by Tom Davenport has become a storytelling classic. He is a 2006 recipient of the Brown-Hudson Folklore Award from the NC Folklore Society. More Information |
|
| Pamela Duncan
(novelist)
Duncan was born in Asheville and raised in Black Mountain, Swannanoa, and Shelby, North Carolina, and currently lives in Saxapahaw, NC. She holds an MA in English/Creative Writing from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Her first novel, Moon Women, was a Southeast Booksellers Association Award Finalist, and her second novel, Plant Life, won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Duncan works at the NC Institute for Public Health at UNC and is currently at work on a third novel, titled The Big Beautiful (featuring Cassandra Moon), which will be published in Spring 2007. More Information |
 |
|
 |
John Ehle
(novelist)
Ehle was raised in Asheville and sets many of his books in North Carolina. He has written 11 works of fiction including Move Over, Mountain, Winter People, The Journey of August King, Widow's Trial and The Road (which recounts building the railroad across the Appalachian mountains). His most recent book of non-fiction is Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. Ehle has received the North Carolina Award for Literature, the Thomas Wolfe Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction, and he is a five-time winner of the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. |
|
| Elizabeth Ellison
(artist/illustrator)
Elizabeth Ellison is a watercolorist-papermaker who has a gallery-studio in Bryson City, NC. Ellison's pen-and-ink drawings and watercolor washes long have graced the work of her husband, writer/naturalist George Ellison, and others. Publishing venues include The Asheville Citizen-Times, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Outdoor Traveler, Friends of Wildlife, High Vistas, and Chinquapin. In September of 2006, The History Press (Charleston, SC) will publish Blue Ridge Nature Journal: Reflections on the Appalachians in Essays and Art by George and Elizabeth Ellison. More Information |
 |
|
 |
George Ellison (naturalist,
columnist)
Ellison, who resides in Bryson City, NC, wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. He writes a “Nature Journal” column for the Asheville Citizen-Times and a regional history “Back Then” column for Smoky Mountain News. A selection of his "Back Then" columns published in 2005 by The History Press in Charleston, SC, as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains has gone into a third printing. More Information |
|
| Jaki
Shelton Green (poet, playwright)
Green received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2003 for her fine poetry and “inveterate championing of the underdog.” Her publications are Dead on Arrival, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Masks, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, and Blue Opal, a play. She has performed her poetry and taught workshops in the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Brazil. Green continues to teach creative writing to marginalized populations of our society such as the homeless, the newly literate, the incarcerated and the writer-as-survivor. Breath of the Song, Selected and New Poems by Jaki Shelton Green was released August 2005. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Elizabeth
Baird Hardy (storyteller,
educator)
Originally from Berea, Kentucky, Hardy comes from a family of storytellers. She began telling stories in public at the age of fifteen, and has hardly stopped since then. Her tales include her "Tales from Two Creeks," named after Indian Creek, where her mother's people lived, and "Jellico Creek," where her father grew up. She also relates the adventures of the hapless circuit-riding Preacher Templeton. In addition to telling stories and teaching workshops throughout the Southeast, Hardy is an English Instructor at Mayland Community College and lives in Avery County with her husband and son, her two favorite characters. |
|
| Michael
Hardy (historian, photographer)
Hardy attended his first Civil War re-enactment at the age of twelve, beginning a fascination with the American Civil War that continues unabated. In 2003, McFarland released his first book, The Thirty-seventh North Carolina Troops: Tarheels in the Army of Northern Virginia. His other books include Avery County: Images of America (Arcadia 2005), A Short History of Old Watauga County (Parkway 2006), and The Battle of Hanover Court House (McFarland 2006). Hardy is a full-time writer, historian, and photographer. He lives on a mountain in Avery County with his wife Elizabeth and their son Nathaniel. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Tommy Hays (novelist)
Hays’s latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, was recently released in paperback. Hays has written two other novels -- Sam’s Crossing and In the Family Way, a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville and Director of Creative Writing for the Academy at the SC Governor's School for the Arts. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He received his BA in English from Furman University and graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. More Information |
|
| Irene
Honeycutt (poet)
Honeycutt has published two poetry collections: Waiting for the Trout to Speak (Novello Festival Press 2002) and It Comes as a Dark Surprise, which won Sandstone Publishing's Regional Poetry Contest in 1992. Honeycutt’s first children’s book, The Prince with the Golden Hair, a fairy tale for children of all ages, will be published in the spring of 2006 by D-N Publishing. She is founder and director of the Central Piedmont's Community College's Annual Spring Literary Festival. In January of 2006, she was featured as NC Poet of the Week by poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer. More Information (scroll down the page this links to) |
 |
|
|
Gloria
Houston (educator)
Currently living again in her native western North Carolina, Dr. Houston works as a writing consultant from her home and speaks as an author and writing consultant when her health permits. Houston's historical fiction has won more than 40 national and one international awards. Her innovative writing methods text and teacher handbook, How Writing Works: Imposing Organizational Structure within the Writing Process, was released in 1994 by Allyn & Bacon/Longman. She is working on a language arts text and handbook, Teaching the Language Arts through the Arts, also for Allyn & Bacon/Longman. More Information presenting with (illustrator,
visual artist) Nicole Arnold
In 2006, High Country Publishers will debut the new edition of Gloria Houston’s Littlejim with Arnolds’s illustrations. Her first book, The ‘Reel’ Thing: A Story of Hope and Joy written by Hunter Darden, was published in 2002. This book was set in the North Carolina mountains. Nicole uses watercolor, pencil and colored pencil to achieve a wholesome and colorful optimism in her illustrations. Arnold is also the Outreach Coordinator for a nonprofit art gallery where she plans art education programs for disadvantaged children. More Information |
|
 |
Dot
Jackson (reporter,
novelist)
Jackson turned an abiding curiosity into a lifelong career in newspapers, going from murder trials to snake-handling prayer meetings to some of the hardest-fought environmental battles of our times. As an investigative reporter for the Charlotte Observer, she wrote about, and often brought to justice, the industrial polluters whose stories garnered Jackson several Pulitzer Prize nominations and a National Conservation Writer of the Year award. She also has collaborated on several acclaimed books of non-fiction. Refuge is Dot Jackson’s first book-length work of fiction. |
|
| Hunter
James (investigative
reporter, editorialist, novelist)
James has spent more than thirty five years as an editorialist and correspondent for such papers as the Atlanta Constitution and Baltimore Sun, winning numerous press association awards for his work, as well as a share of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. His articles and stories have appeared in Newsweek, National Geographic (book division), Historic Preservation, Southern Magazine, The Southern Review. He has published eight books (including All the Forgotten Places and Last Days of the Big Grassy Fork) and a novel. The Famous Embroidered Towels of Dusseldorf: intrigue and betrayal in a Foreign Land is due out later this year. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Cameron
Judd (historical novelist)
A native of Greene County, Tennessee, Judd writes western fiction and is director of communications for Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee. Since 1980 Judd has written more than 30 novels published in the U.S. and Canada; more than two million copies of his novels remain in print, including the highly acclaimed The Overmountain Men, Crockett of Tennessee and Boone. He is also the author of one nonfiction book about the Civil War in East Tennessee, The Bridge Burners. His novels Crockett of Tennessee and The Canebrake Men were national finalists for the Western Writers of America Spur Award. |
|
| Stephen
Kirk (editor, non-fictionalist)
Kirk has been the editor at John F. Blair, Publisher, since 1988. He is the author of Scribblers: Stalking the Authors of the Appalachia, an IPPY Award finalist, and First In Flight: The Wright Brothers in North Carolina, one of the sources used in the national PBS documentary commemorating the first-flight centennial. The second story he ever wrote was selected for reprinting in the Best American Short Stories series. He lives near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Sharyn
McCrumb (novelist)
McCrumb’s award-winning novels celebrating the history and folklore of Appalachia have received scholarly acclaim and ranked on the New York Times Best-Seller lists. Among her works are Ghost Riders, The Songcatcher, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, The Rosewood Casket, She Walks These Hills, and If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. In her newest novel, St. Dale (Kensington 2005), McCrumb has crafted a moving tale of transformation and everyday miracles that finds the seam of humanity behind our need for perfect heroes. In November 2003, she was presented with the Wilma Dykeman Award for Regional Historical Literature by the East Tennessee Historical Society More Information |
|
| Joan Medlicott (novelist)
Born in the Virgin Islands, Medlicott has lived in many towns and cities in the US and in Europe. After careers in Horticulture and as Program Coodinator for a Senior Center in Florida, Joan began a career in writing. At age 64 her first Ladies of Covington novel was published. The sixth in the series, Two Days After the Wedding, will be published in June 2006. The seventh novel will be out in 2008. Joan's novel, The Three Mrs. Parkers, was very well received and she is working on another non-Covington novel. Joan can be characterized as an optimist and a self-starter. She lives and works in Barnardsville, north of Asheville, North Carolina. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Karen
Miller (educator,
children's novelist)
Protesting “There’s nothing to read,” Karen Miller’s 6th grade students convinced her to write a book just for them. Everyone liked monsters, they told her. But there weren’t any books about real monsters. So Miller began a six year study of undiscovered beasts. Her first book, Monsters, Shapeshifters and Water Beasts, will be published by Henry Holt in spring 2007. A teacher, literature consultant, bookseller and mother of four, Karen Miller lives in Burnsville, North Carolina with her husband, Bob and dog Lucy. She has four adult children, aged 22-31 years old. |
|
| Michael
Parker (novelist)
Parker is the author of five works of fiction including the novels Hello Down There and If You Want Me To Stay. His stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Five Points, Shenandoah and many other magazines and in the Pushcart, New Stories from the South and O. Henry Award anthologies. A new collection of stories, Don’t Make Me Stop Now, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2007. For his work he has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2006 Mary Frances Hobson Award in Arts and Letters. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro. |
 |
|
 |
Charles
F. Price (historical novelist)
Price has published four novels to date: Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War, Freedom's Altar, (1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award), The Cock's Spur (Independent Publisher's 2001 Book Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Books of the Year and Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award) and Where the Water-Dogs Laughed. One of the chief characters in his new Revolutionary War novel Nor the Battle to the Strong is a maternal ancestor who served in the Continental Army. Nor the Battle to the Strong is forthcoming in 2007 from Frederic C. Beil Publisher of Savannah, GA. He currently lives in Yancey County. More Information |
|
| Jim
Priesmeyer (historic storyteller)
During his seven years developing the Historic McElroy House, the Museum of Yancey County History, Priesmeyer uncovered the personal stories of the home's owners and their insights into 200 years of the county's history. Using his training as a grant writer (a successful grant is a story told in a compelling way) and his extensive experience as a character actor, Jim wrote and performs CSA Gen. J.W. McElroy's (1820-1870) story "A Final Farewell" and the companion story of US Capt. Wm. Moore (1850-1900) "A Fond Farewell". A cast of other historical figures are fodder for other one man shows. |
 |
|
 |
Jack
R. Pyle (novelist)
Pyle writes mysteries (The Death of Adam Stone), love stories (After Many a Summer), young adult fiction (The Gold Bug of Farrow Point) and has even broached Civil War Era women's rights in Black Horse White Rider. The Sound of Distant Thunder was chosen Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association in 1999. He has co-authored the two "moon" books with Taylor Reese because he came from that background and because he could see this bit of planting lore being lost on the "Computer Generation." Pyle has also published a book of short stories Pieces of the Puzzle. More Information |
|
| Ron Rash (poet,
novelist, short storyist)
Rash is the author of six books: The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth (short stories), Casualties (short stories), Eureka Mill (poetry), and Among the Believers (poetry), Raising the Dead (poetry), One Foot in Eden (novel) and Saints at the River (novel) His third novel, The World Made Straight, will be published by Henry Holt in January, 2006. Rash is a past winner of an NEA Poetry Fellowship. In 2002, he was awarded Foreword Magazine's Gold Medal in Literary Fiction for his novel One Foot in Eden. The novel was also named Appalachian Book of the Year. Saints at the River has been chosen for Western North Carolina's Together We Read program. More Information (scroll down the page this links to) |
 |
|
 |
Taylor
Reese (eclectic author)
Reese has authored several books including HUMOR Is Where You Find It, HUMOR and A Little Bit More, From Here To There (a memoir of the first 17 years of his life), and A Glimpse At Life (a book of down-to-earth poetry written in four categories: Nature, Encouragement, Humor and Miscellany.) With co-author Jack R. Pyle, he has written two books on how to use the farmer’s almanac: Raising With The Moon and You and the Man in the Moon. Reese was a court reporter for three decades, taking down the words of everybody else, and decided to write some of his own. More Information |
|
| Jacque
Red Leaf (storyteller)
Both Cherokee and Choctaw, she is known by her Cherokee name Eagle Woman. Her life is put into teaching Indian arts, customs, games, songs, cultural vaules, tradition and history. She is a Traditonal Dancer, teaches beadwork, basketweaving, and leather work. Perhaps better known for her legend-telling than anything else, Eagle Woman brings the native culture to life through the legends not only of the Cherokee, but many other tribes, as well. She has lectured and spoken at many universitites, art centers, museums and civic organizations all over the country. Currently she lives in Yancey County, North Carolina. |
 |
|
 |
Pat Riviere-Seel
(poet)
Her first collection of poems, No Turning Back Now, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She teaches in UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program and at the College for Seniors at UNCA. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She is the president of the North Carolina Poetry Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Poetry Council of NC. A native of Shelby, NC, she is a former resident of Yancey County. She currently lives in Asheville with her husband and two cats. |
|
| David Schulman (novelist,
columnist, freelancer)
Schulman began his writing career in the second grade in Sylva, North Carolina while stretched out on the living room floor watching the Milton Berle Show. After two decades developing his own chain of clothing stores in Western NC, he began chronicling his own and others' history of growing up Jewish in the South, eventually winning the NC Press Club's Best Personal Columnist Award for 1994 and 1995 for his articles in Charlotte's Times-Outlook magazine. He now writes frequently for Our State: Down Home in North Carolina magazine as well as other periodicals. The Past Is Never Dead is his first novel. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Betty
Smith (ballad singer, educator)
Smith has performed, taught and shared the traditional music of the South for over thirty years in classrooms, concert halls, workshops, and festivals. She has been honored by the Appalachian Writers Association for her contributions to Appalachian Literature, by the North Carolina Folklore Society for her contributions to the study and appreciation of folklife with the Brown-Hudson Award, and the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Award for “significant contributions to Appalachian music”. Her book, Jane Hicks Gentry: A Singer Among Singers, was awarded the Willie Parker Peace History Book Award by the North Carolina Society of Historians. More Information |
|
| Shelby Stephenson
(poet,
editor, musician)
Stephenson, professor of English at UNC-Pembroke, edits Pembroke Magazine. He has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, the Playwright's Fund of North Carolina Chapbook Prize, and the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. In addition to a poetic documentary Plankhouse (with photos by Roger Manley), he has published Middle Creek Poems, Carolina Shout!, Finch’s Mash, The Persimmon Tree Carol, Poor People, Greatest Hits, Fiddledeedee, and POSSUM (Bright Hill Press Prize and Campbell-Brockman Award). He has also made the CDs: Hank Williams Tribute and The Stephenson Brothers & Linda Sing the Old Songs. More Information |
 |
|
 |
Peter
Turchi (novelist, non-fictionalist,
educator)
Turchi is the author of a novel, a collection of stories, and two books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He has also co-edited two anthologies, The Story Behind the Story and Bringing the Devil to His Knees, and an exhibition catalog for the artist Charles Ritchie. The recipient of North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, he has taught in and directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1993. More Information |
|
| Seabrook
Wilkinson (educator, literary
critic)
Wilkinson’s connections with Charleston and the Carolina Lowcountry go back to 1670. Most of his education was far afield, at Harvard (A.B., History of Art) and then Oxford (B.A., M.A., Theology). He remained in Britain to work in another ancestral city, Edinburgh, as Head of English at Fettes College. As Charlestonians tend to do, he came home to roost, and while teaching at local colleges began to ascend the Ph.D. salmon-leap, whose top rung he is now approaching. His published criticism ranges from Marlowe to Frost. After decades of scrutinizing the poems of others, he began to write his own again; A Local Habitation is forthcoming. |
 |
|
 |
Perry
Deane Young (biographer,
playwright)
Young has authored nine books, two plays and one screenplay. Several of his books stem from Yancey county hertitage: The Untold Story of Frankie Silver, Was She Justly Hanged?, Hanged by a Dream, and Our Young Family. His first book was the widely praised Two of the Missing, a Vietnam memoir. The David Kopay Story, spent nine weeks on the New York Times Bestseller and was named one of the ten Best Books for Young Adults of 1977 by the American Library Association. He has also published a drama, Mountain of Hope, based on the life and death of UNC Prof. Elisha Mitchell, for whom the county's mountain is named. More Information |
|
| Isabel Zuber (poet,
novelist)
Zuber was born and grew up in Boone, NC. She lives in Winston-Salem, was a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years, and is now writing full time. Some of her prizes include the publication prize in the North Carolina Writers Network poetry chapbook contest, Lee Smith Award for Fiction from the Appalachian Writers Association, University of Tennessee Press prize for short story, Forsyth County Arts Council grant, and she was selected as one of the readers in the Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series. Her poetry collections are Oriflamb, from the North Carolina Writers Network, and Winter’s Exile, from Scots Plaid Press. Her novel, Salt, was selected in 2003 for Virginia Commonwealth University’s First Novel. More Information |
 |
|
| * photo credits can be seen by moving the cursor over the image | ||
