Ron Rash

Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700's, and it is this region that is the primary focus of his writing. Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University. He holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.

In 1994 he was awarded an National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and he won the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996. In 2001 he won the Novella Festival Novel Award, and in 2002 he was awarded Foreword Magazine’s Gold Medal in Literary Fiction for his novel One Foot in Eden. The novel was named Appalachian Book of the Year. In 2005, his novel Saints at the River was named Fiction Book of the Year by both the Southern Book Critics Circle and the Southeastern Booksellers Association. Also in 2005, he won an O. Henry Award for his story “Speckled Trout.”

Rash is the author of: The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth, short stories; Casualties, short stories; Eureka Mill, poetry; Among the Believers, poetry; Raising the Dead, poetry; One Foot in Eden, a novel; and Saints at the River, a novel. His third novel, The World Made Straight, was published by Henry Holt in April, 2006.

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