UNC Asheville accepting applications for first Ramsey Library Community Author Award

UNC Asheville is now accepting applications for the first Ramsey Library Community Author Award for a prose writer in Western North Carolina. The award will provide a yearlong residency in UNC Asheville’s Ramsey Library, with a courtesy faculty appointment that will provide a library study carrel and other campus resources. Entries will be judged by a committee, including best-selling author and UNC Asheville Writer-in-Residence Wiley Cash. Heather Newton, author of the award-winning novel Under the Mercy Trees, will serve as the final judge for the award.

"It's no secret that Asheville has one of the most vibrant and diverse literary communities in the nation,” said Cash. “The Ramsey Library Community Author Award connects UNC Asheville with these writers, bringing them into the inspiring campus community and offering them the necessary privacy and space that writing demands."

Newton is a local author, lawyer and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her novel, Under the Mercy Trees, won the 2011 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”), and was long-listed for both the 2012 SIBA Book Award and the American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow project.

The residency period runs from January – December, 2017, and will culminate in an opportunity for the Community Author to showcase his or her work at a campus reading at the end of the residency period, and will alternate each year between prose in fiction or non-fiction and poetry/drama. The Ramsey Library Community Author Award is open to writers residing in Western North Carolina, and requires a writing sample, a CV or resume, and two references. Applications are available online at library.unca.edu/RLCAA/community_author_award.