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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. A forthcoming novel, Prayers the Devil Answers, will be published by Atria (Simon & Schuster) in 2016. Her novel, King’s Mountain (2013, St. Martin’s Press), the story of the 1780 Revolutionary War battle and the Overmountain Men, received a DAR Award from the Edward Buncombe Chapter (NC)., and is taught in schools and featured at a number of historical museums.
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.
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 books are frequently used in One Community/One Book programs, most recently King’s Mountain by Alleghany County, NC; The Ballad of Frankie Silver by the town of Gallatin TN and Volunteer State College; and The Devil Amongst the Lawyers in Winchester VA.
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 (new edition, March 2013,) 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.
A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, with an M.A. from Virginia Tech, she lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge. Sharyn McCrumb is the subject of the book From A Race of Storytellers: The Ballad Novels of Sharyn McCrumb. Ed: Kimberley M. Holloway. Mercer University Press, 2005.
