Wiley Cash

Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Wiley Cash grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina. He earned a BA from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, an MA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. At Louisiana, he studied with Ernest Gaines, an influence on his thinking about the importance of place in fiction. Cash identifies early twentieth-century Appalachian author Thomas Wolfe and southern authors William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Bobbie Ann Mason as other sources of his interest in place....

Gurney Norman

Gurney Norman was born in the coalfields of Virginia in 1937 and spent his childhood under the care of his grandparents in that state and Kentucky. As an undergraduate student at the University of Kentucky, Norman met future writers Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Norman continued his study of writing at Stanford University. From 1963 to 1965 Norman worked as a reporter at the ...