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New York Times bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb to receive Patricia Winn Award for Southern Fiction at Clarksville Writers Conference banquet June 4th

Clarksville Writers ConferenceClarksville, TN – The Clarksville Arts and Heritage Development Council will honor novelist Sharyn McCrumb with their first-ever Patricia Winn Award for Southern Fiction at the June 4th Clarksville Writers Conference banquet.

McCrum, award-winning Southern writer best known for her Appalachian “Ballad” novels, including a number of New York Times bestsellers, will also give the keynote address at Thursday evening’s banquet at Club Level of Austin Peay State University’s newly renovated Governors Stadium, featuring a gorgeous view of this historic campus.

Sharyn McCrumb to receive Patricia Winn Award at  11th Annual Clarksville Writers Conference.
Sharyn McCrumb to receive Patricia Winn Award at 11th Annual Clarksville Writers Conference.

Clarksville Writers Conference

The banquet is a stand-alone part of the conference, and Clarksvillians may attend it even if they do not register for the two days of workshops and readings.

Reservations may be made through the AHDC website, www.artsandheritage.us/writers or by sending a check for $50.00 to AHDC, P.O. Box 555, Clarksville, TN 37043.

The award, established by AHDC to honor Clarksville Writers Conference founder Patricia Winn, carries a $1,000 stipend and recognizes an outstanding work of Southern fiction published within the last two years. Nominations of Southern novels were made by area librarians last fall, and the conference organizing committee selected the winning work.

Fort Campbell Sink Library Director James Moore nominated McCrumb’s Revolutionary War novel, King’s Mountain (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), which tells the story of the Overmountain Men in the American Revolution. One reviewer on goodreads.com commented, “It is a rich and informative coup in historical writing, bringing dead history to life, as do McCrumb’s other novels.”

The conference committee agreed and voted unanimously to offer the Winn Award for this book, which features Tennessean John Sevier, as one of its major characters.

Winn, retired Clarksville High librarian, organized the first Clarksville Writers Conference 11 years ago. Her motivation was to honor Clarksville’s literary heritage with strong connections to Southern Renaissance writers Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon and Robert Tate and to encourage present-day Clarksvillians in their literary aspirations.

Among McCrumb’s New York Times bestsellers are The Ballad of Tom Dooley, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, She Walks These Hills, The Rosewood Casket and Ghost Riders, which won the Wilma Dykeman Award for Literature from the East Tennessee Historical Society and the national Audie Award for Best Recorded Book.

Her next novel, Prayers the Devil Answers, will be published in late 2015 by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster.

“My books are like Appalachian quilts,” McCrumb says. “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.”

In addition to presenting programs at universities, libraries and other organizations throughout the nation, Sharyn McCrumb has taught a writers workshop in Paris and served as writer-in-residence at King University in Tennessee, as well as at the Chautauqua Institute in western New York.

A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, with an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech, she lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge. Visit Sharyn McCrumb on the web at www.sharynmccrumb.com

The Eleventh Annual Clarksville Writers Conference, June 4th and 5th, 2015, on the campus of Austin Peay State University, is partially sponsored by the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Gannett Foundation, Dr. Howard and Patricia Winn, and Austin Peay State University.

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