This past Friday, BA/MA students and faculty gathered together for the first potluck of the year with great food and even better company. Sitting outside enjoying the beautiful weather, first years, second years, and professors alike caught up on their summers and the beginning of their semesters with, of course, a few breaks in between to jump on the trampoline. Thank you to everyone who came out for the delicious food and a special thank you to Julia Kasdorf for hosting! We all can’t wait until the next event!

Join us this upcoming Monday, September 26^th, as bestselling novelist, short story writer, and poet, Ron Rash, opens this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 pm in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena as well as One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight, Above the Waterfall, and The Risen, released on September 6^th. In addition to novels, Rash has also published five collections of poems and six collections of stories. Two of his short story collections have won awards as well: Burning Bright received the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and Chemistry and Other Stories was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award.  Rash is also a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize and winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Publisher’s Weekly offers the following praise for Rash’s most recent novel, The Risen: “Beyond the propulsion of Rash’s thrilled whodunit plot is his characteristically excellent prose.”  Dannye Powell at The Charlotte Observer proclaims, “The Risen is an important novel – and an intriguing one – from one of our master storytellers. In its pages, the past rises up, haunting and chiding, demanding answers of us all.” The Philadelphia Inquirer has hailed him as “our Appalachian Shakespeare.”

In an interview for the South Carolina Review, Rash stated, “I don’t like living in cities.” His novels, short stories, and poetry, therefore, often have a focus on the lives of people in rural, southern settings.

Currently living in North Carolina with his family, Rash also teaches at Western Carolina University where he serves as the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies.