Best-selling author set to visit high school

Sharyn McCrumb is a New York Times best-selling author whose award-winning novels celebrating the history and folklore of Appalachia have received both scholarly and popular acclaim.

She will be speaking and signing books at Warren County High School auditorium March 27 at 7 p.m. The event, provided by Motlow State Community College, is free and open to the public.

McCrumb’s great-grandfathers were circuit preachers in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains 100 years ago, riding horseback over the ridges to preach in a different community each week. It is from them, she says, that she gets her regard for books, her gift of storytelling and public speaking, and her love of the Appalachian Mountains.

“My books are like Appalachian quilts,” says McCrumb. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.”

Her 17 novels include the “Ballad Books:” If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, and the New York Times best sellers: She Walks These Hills, The Rosewood Casket, and The Ballad of Frankie Silver. The latter, the true story of a young mountain woman hanged for murder in North Carolina in 1833, received nomination for SEBA Book of the Year and Virginia Book of the Year. All of the Ballad novels have been named New York Times or Los Angeles Times Notable Books. The Songcatcher uses a ballad as the narrative thread, tracing Sharyn McCrumb’s family from the kidnapping of 9-year-old Malcolm MacQuarrie in 18th century Scotland to his descendants in present day Appalachia.