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Record Numbers Attend Annual Arts and
Humanities Speaker's Forum
Northeast Alabama Community College in Rainsville, Alabama, held
its annual Arts and Humanities Speaker’s Forum recently. Guest
speaker was award-winning author Ron Rash, who addressed a group
of over 400 in the college’s Tom Bevill Lyceum. Immediately
following the reading, Rash signed books and returned to the
college’s library that evening for another reading and book
signing.
Rash is the author of three books of
poetry—Eureka Mill (2000), Among the Believers
(2000), and Raising the Dead (2002); two collections of
short stories—The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth
(1994) and Casualties (2000); three novels—One Foot in
Eden (2002), Saints at the River (2004), and The
World Made Straight (2006); and one children’s book—The
Shark’s Tooth (2001). A third collection of short stories,
Chemistry and Other Stories, is to be published by
Picador in April 2007.
Rash has received the Academy of American
Poetry Prize (1986), the South Carolina Academy of Authors
Poetry Award (1994), a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry
Fellowship (1994), the Sherwood Anderson Award (1996), the
Novella Festival Novel Award (2001), the O. Henry Prize for 2005
for his short story “Speckled Trout,” and the Fellowship of
Southern Writers’ James Still Award for Writing about the
Appalachian South (2005). Rash also won the Forward
Magazine’s Gold Medal for the Best Literary Novel of 2002
and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award
of 2003 for his novel One Foot in Eden. In 2004 Rash was
awarded the Weatherford Award for Best Novel for Saints at
the River, which was also named Fiction Book of the Year by
both the Southern Book Critics Circle and the Southeastern
Booksellers Association. His third novel, The World Made
Straight, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction in
2006.
 Rash
grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. He earned a
bachelor’s degree in English from Gardner-Webb College and a
master’s degree in English from Clemson University. He taught
high school English for two years and was an instructor of
English at a technical college for seventeen years.
Additionally, he has taught at Queens College, Clemson
University, and the University of Georgia, and presently serves
as the first Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian
Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University.
Dr. David Campbell, President of NACC,
began the Arts and Humanities Speaker’s Forum in 1994. Since
that first year, the Forum has hosted such writers as Janisse
Ray, Mary Hood, Dori Sanders, Thomas Cook, and Jerry Ellis. This
event is offered for the community as well as the students,
faculty, and staff at Northeast. For more information about
events at the College, see the
Calendar of
Events. |
