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 She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket. McCrumb, who has been named a “Virginia Woman of History” in 2008 for Achievement in Literature, was a guest author at the National Festival of the Book in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the White House in 2006. In May, 2011 she received the Perry F. Kendig Award for Achievement in Literature from the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge, in Roanoke VA.

Coming in August 2011: The Ballad of Tom Dooley, (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Press, New York), which tells the true story behind the folk song, made famous by the Kingston Trio: an account of a tragedy in the North Carolina mountains in the aftermath of the Civil War. Laura Foster, a simple country girl, was murdered and buried in a shallow grave on a mountain side, and her lover Tom Dula was hanged for the crime. The sensational elements in the case attracted national attention: a man and his beautiful married lover accused of murdering the other woman, with the former Confederate governor of North Carolina spearheading the defense.

Her most recent novel, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (Thomas Dunne Books, June 2010), a look at regional stereotyping of the rural South by the national media, was a finalist for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian fiction and is shortlisted for the SIBA Book of the Year. It was chosen as the 2011 One Community/One Book selection for Winchester VA.

St. Dale, The Canterbury Tales in a NASCAR setting, in which ordinary people on a pilgrimage in honor of racing legend Dale Earnhardt find a miracle, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award as well as the AWA Book of the Year Award.

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; and The Songcatcher, a genealogy in music, tracing the author‘s family from 18th century Scotland to the present by following a Scots Ballad through the generations. Ghost Riders, an account of the Civil War in the mountains of western North Carolina, won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature given by the East Tennessee Historical Society and the Audie Award for Best Recorded Book.

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. 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 eleven 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.

A film of her novel The Rosewood Casket is currently in development, directed by British Academy Award nominee Roberto Schaefer.

Sharyn McCrumb is a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, with an M.A. from Virginia Tech. She lives and writes near Roanoke, Virginia.

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