News RSS

On November 11, The Western North Carolina Historical Association and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Advisory Board presented the 2017 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award Trophy and a check for $1500 to Julia Franks for her novel, Over the Plain Houses. Other finalists were Family of Earth  by Wilma Dykeman - posthumously published Hazel Creek by Daniel Pierce The Risen by Ron Rash This award has been given since 1955 for the outstanding book of the year  by a Western North Carolina resident or depicting the region. The first winner was The French Broad by Wilma Dykeman. Previous winners include  Robert...

The Southern Book Prizes have been announced by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan won for Historical Fiction. Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks won for Literary Fiction Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance won for Creative Nonfiction The Fellowship of Southern Writers inducted twenty new members in 2017. Nine of them have strong ties to Appalachia. Rick Bragg, from Calhoun County, Alabama, and a prolific non-fiction writer. Amy Greene, from Hawkins County, Tennessee, the author of two novels. Silas House, from Laurel County, Kentucky, the author of youth and trade novels and...

In a ceremony at Coffee Tree Books in Morehead, Kentucky, on September 28th, Darnell Arnoult was awarded the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, named after and endowed by the family of Lillie Chaffin (1925-1993), a Pike County native who was a teacher, a librarian, an editor, the author of 17 books and who became a Kentucky Poet Laureate in 1974.  The award has been administered by the Morehead State University English Department since 1996 when James Still became the first recipient. Darnell Arnoult  is a native of Martinsville, Virginia,  who currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate...

Thomas Edward Douglass died of cancer on August 11, 2017 at the age of 65. He is the author of definitive literary biographies of two seminal West Virginia authors, Breece D’J Pancake (A Room Forever, 2004) and Davis Grubb (Voice of Glory, 2017) and was the editor of the Appalachian Echoes series for the University of Tennessee Press. He personally edited two reprints in that series, Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest and Davis Grubb’s Fools Parade. Douglass taught contemporary literature at Eastern Carolina University. He did his undergraduate work at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia, and his M.A....

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance has released its “Okra Picks” for the Summer of 2017. Among them is Blight by Alexandra Duncan. The author, who lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, is a science fiction writer whose first two books, Salvage and Sound were very well received. Blight is set in North Georgia and deals with a polluting agribusiness facility. It is scheduled for release in August. If the Creek Don’t Rise by Leah Weiss is another Summer 2017 Okra Pick. This is an explicitly Appalachian novel from an author with ties to both North Carolina and Virginia....