History
NOTED GUESTS OF THE PAST
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, The Rosewood Casket, The Ballad of Frankie Silver and The Songcatcher. 
Her novel 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. St. Dale, a modern allegory of The Canterbury Tales in a NASCAR setting, won a 2006 Library of Virginia Award, as well as the AWA Book of the Year Award, and was featured at the National Festival of the Book. McCrumb's most recent novels are The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, a Ballad novel set in Wise, VA in 1935; and Faster Pastor, a comic Southern novel co-authored with NASCAR driver Adam Edwards. McCrumb was named a “Virginia Woman of History” in 2008 for Achievement in Literature. 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 film of The Rosewood Casket is currently in production, directed by British Academy Award nominee Roberto Schaefer. McCrumb lives and writes near Roanoke, Virginia.
Jeannette Walls
After a successful career as a journalist and gossip columnist and after penning a well-received book about the gossip industry, Jeannette Walls wrote her award-winning 2006 memoir The Glass Castle, a book which described Walls’ unconventional and, sometimes, shocking upbringing at the hands of two loving but unstable parents. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Walls traveled with her itinerant parents and three siblings across the western United States until the family moved to her father’s hometown of Welch, West Virginia. Walls, her two sisters, and a brother lived in severe poverty and experienced bouts of homelessness as a result of their parents’ unorthodox world views and refusal to conform to societal standards. At seventeen, Walls followed an older sister to New York City and finished high school there, going on to receive a degree from Barnard College. She found success as a writer for New York magazine and as a gossip columnist for MSNBC, eventually writing the book Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip. However, it wasn’t until The Glass Castle was published that Walls’ New York colleagues became aware of the details of her curious upbringing. That year The Glass Castle received the Christopher Award, the American Library Association's Alex Award and the Books for Better Living Award and has since sold over one million copies.
Craig Johnson
Craig Johnson has received both critical and popular praise for his novels The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man’s Moccasins and The Dark Horse. All five novels have been made selections by the Independent Booksellers Association, and The Cold Dish was a DILYS Award Finalist and was translated into French in 2009 as Little Bird and was just named one of the top ten mysteries of the year by Lire magazine. Death Without Company was selected by Booklist as one of the top-ten mysteries of 2006, won the Wyoming Historical Society’s fiction book of the year. The short story, Old Indian Trick, won the Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story Award and appeared in Cowboys & Indians Magazine. Kindness Goes Unpunished, the third in the Walt Longmire series, was number 38 on the American Bookseller’s Association’s hardcover best seller list. Another Man’s Moccasins, was the recipient of Western Writer’s of America’s Spur Award as Novel of the Year and the Mountains and Plains Book of the Year. The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series has garnered starred reviews by all four prepublication review services. Craig is also Director at Large for Mystery Writers of America. Craig lives with his wife Judy on their ranch in Ucross, Wyoming, population 25.
Rick Bragg
Rick Bragg, author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling All Over but the Shoutin' and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, says he learned to tell stories by listening to the masters, the people of the foothills of the Appalachians. They talked, of the sadness, poverty, cruelty, kindness, hope, hopelessness, faith, anger and joy of their everyday lives, and painted pictures on the very haze of the early evening, when work faded into story-telling. Those stories are the backbone of his third book, Ava's Man, the story of a whiskey man, poacher, roofer and folk legend who was his mother's father, and the grandfather he never saw. He is single, likely to stay that way, and lives in a shotgun double house not far from the levee and the train tracks in Uptown New Orleans, where he has cultivated several fine weeds in his back yard.
Sara Pritchard
Sara Pritchard’s award-winning novel, Crackpots, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2003 and went on to become a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. As Ursula Hegi notes in her foreword to Crackpots, the book's dramatic tension arises from its differing perspectives on protagonist Ruby Reese. Introduced in the womb, Ruby is the eccentric pigtailed movie extra who plays the trombone while her mother gives piano lessons and the youngest of a family that is termed "a buncha crackpots" by its Pennsylvania neighbors. Individual vignettes are telling and vivid, and the more intimate moments are engrossing. Furthermore, the tight dialogue and lyrical observations hold Ruby's world together beautifully. Under the pseudonym Delta B. Horne, Sara has also published stories and essays in Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Chattahoochee Review, Northwest Review and elsewhere. Sara lives in Morgantown, West Virginia and is on the faculty of the Wilkes University Low-Residency MA/MFA Creative Writing Program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
M. Glenn Taylor
M. Glenn Taylor was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia. The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart is his first novel. It was a Fall 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and it was also a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award. The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart is an epic novel about the oldest living man in West Virginia and the often unbelievable events of his life. His next novel will be titled The Marrowbone Marble Company and will tell the story of a glass factory worker from Huntington, West Virginia who enlists in the Marines shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Taylor teaches English and fiction writing at Harper College in suburban Chicago, where he lives with his wife and two sons.
Jean Edward Smith 
Jean Edward Smith is the first John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University and a John Deaver Drinko Academy Distinguished Fellow. He is the author of twelve books, including most recently, FDR, a full-length biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which won the 2008 Francis Parkinson Prize of the Society of American Historians for the “best book on an American theme published the previous year” and was on the New York Times best-seller list. In addition to FDR, Smith has written Grant, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant that was a 2002 Pulitzer Prize finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Notable Book and a Publisher’s Weekly Book of the Year; a work on John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, entitled John Marshall: definer of a Nation; and a biography of General Lucius D. Clay. He is presently at work on a biography of Dwight David Eisenhower which will be published by Random House in 2011.
Lisa Scottoline
Lisa Scottoline spent many hours as a child in her local library and her love
for reading was encouraged by the librarians she was lucky enough
to meet along the way. A true believer in the importance of
promoting reading, Lisa is a strong advocate and dedicated fan
of libraries and librarians. In her small way, Lisa tries to
give back to a system which has given so much too so many, by
participating in library events across the country. She has
been to several library conferences and has visited libraries
from coast to coast. A regular at the Philadelphia Free Library,
Lisa participated in the "Visiting Author" series
at the Des Moines Public Library, was a keynote speaker at the
New Jersey Library Association Conference and was a banquet
speaker for the Oregon/Washington Library Association Conference.
Jon Carloftis
Jon Carloftis was born and raised in Kentucky on the banks of the Rockcastle River where his parents operated a popular tourist attraction. Carloftis studied horticulture, landscape architecture and art history at the University of Kentucky. After moving to New York City, he started designing rooftop gardens, balconies and courtyards for art collectors where the beauty of his work spread to others and his business blossomed. He is a contributing editor to Garden Design magazine and a regional writer for Country Gardens.
Harvey Pekar
Harvey Pekar is best known as an icon in the comic industry for his autobiographical comic book series American Splendor that was later adapted into a movie. Pekar is also a well known reviewer and critic of books and jazz music and has won awards for his essays that have been broadcast on public radio. He collaborated with his wife, Joyce Brabner, on Our Cancer Year, a comic book autobiography of his battle with cancer.
Asra Q. Nomani
Asra Q. Nomani was born in Bombay, India and came to the United States at age of four where she was raised in Morgantown WV. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal correspondant and has written for the Washington Post and The New York Times. Her struggles with her Moslem culture and the modern world are the basis of her critically-acclaimed Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. She has also written Tantrika: Traveling the Road of Divine Love.
