Ron Rash

Announcement of the 2007 Alex Awards, presented by the Young Adult Library Services Association, came as part of the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting held Jan. 19-24 in Seattle.

Sponsored by the Margaret Alexander Edwards Trust, the awards are designed to recognize that many teens enjoy and often prefer books written for adults, and to assist librarians in recommending adult books that appeal to teens. The award is named in honor of the late Margaret Alexander Edwards, called “Alex” by her closest friends, a young adult specialist at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. She used adult books extensively with young adults to broaden their experience and enrich their understanding of themselves and their world.

“The World Made Straight” also will be required reading for the 2007 freshman class at WCU, as a university committee has picked Rash’s novel as the Freshman Reading Program selection. Through the program, now in its ninth year at Western, new freshmen each summer receive a copy of a book selected by a university committee. Students are expected to read the book over the summer, and discuss it and write about the book as it is incorporated into their fall semester studies.

This marks the second time WCU has selected a work by Rash for its Freshman Reading Program. His debut novel “One Foot in Eden” was the 2004 selection.

Rash’s family has lived in the Southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700s, and the region is the primary focus of his writing. He grew up in Boiling Springs and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University.

Rash was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1994, and he won the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996. In 2001, he won the Novella Festival Novel Award, and in 2002 he was awarded Foreword Magazine’s Gold Medal in Literary Fiction for “One Foot in Eden,” which was named Appalachian Book of the Year.

His novel “Saints at the River” was named Fiction Book of the Year in 2005 by both the Southern Book Critics Circle and the Southeastern Booksellers Association. Also in 2005, he won an O. Henry Award for his story “Speckle Trout” and received the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His third novel, “The World Made Straight,” was published by Henry Holt in April 2006 and received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for 2006.

His poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 100 journals, magazines and anthologies, including The Longman Anthology of Southern Literature, Western Wind, Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah and Poetry.

Rash is the author of eight books, including “The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth” (short stories), “Casualties” (short stories), “Eureka Mill” (poetry), “Among the Believers” (poetry) and “Raising the Dead” (poetry).  His short story collection “Chemistry and Other Stories” will be published by Picador in May 2007.