Sharyn McCrumb

Sharyn McCrumb is an award-winning Southern writer, best known for her Appalachian "Ballad" novels, set in the North Carolina/Tennessee mountains, including the New York Times Best Sellers: "The Ballad of Tom Dooley," "She Walks These Hills" and "The Rosewood Casket." Her new novel, "King's Mountain," the story of the 1780 Revolutionary War battle and the Overmountain Men, was published in September 2013 by St. Martins Press, NY.

Her books are frequently used in One Community/One Book programs, most recently "The Ballad of Frankie Silver" by the town of Gallatin, TN and Volunteer State College, and T"he Devil Amongst the Lawyers" in Winchester, VA.

In April 2014, Sharyn McCrumb was awarded the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature by North Carolina's Chowan University. Named a "Virginia Woman of History" in 2008 for Achievement in Literature, she was a guest author at the National Festival of the Book in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the White House in 2006.

Sharyn McCrumb's other best-selling novels include "The Ballad of Frankie Silver," the story of the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina, "Ghost Riders," an account of the Civil War in the mountains of western North Carolina, which won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature given by the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book, was published in a new edition in March 2012 by J.F. Blair Press. A theatrical version of "Ghost Riders" was staged in June 2014 at the Parkway Playhouse in Burnsville NC.

McCrumb's other honors include: AWA Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature Award; the Chaffin Award for Southern Literature; the Plattner Award for Short Story; and AWA's Best Appalachian Novel. She was recently named "Best Mountain Writer 2013" by Blue Ridge Country Magazine. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, with an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech, McCrumb was the first writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee. In 2005 she honored as the Writer of the Year at Emory & Henry College.

Her novels, studied in universities throughout the world, have been translated into 11 languages, including French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic and Italian. She has lectured on her work at Oxford University, the University of Bonn-Germany and at the Smithsonian Institution; taught a writers workshop in Paris, and served as writer-in-residence at King College in Tennessee and at the Chautauqua Institute in western New York.

Sharyn McCrumb is the subject of the book "From A Race of Storytellers: The Ballad Novels of Sharyn McCrumb." A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, with an M.A. from Virginia Tech, she lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge.