Featured Authors

Charles F. Price:

Charles F. Price writes and teaches in his native North Carolina mountains. After a career as a journalist, urban planner, management consultant and Washington Lobbyist, he published Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War. His second book, Freedom's Altar, won the 1999 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best work of fiction by a North Carolinian. The Cock's Spur earned Independent Publisher's 2001 Book Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Books of the Year and won the Clark Cox Historical Fiction Award of the North Carolina Society of Historians, and Price was named Story Teller of the Year for 2000.

In Where the Water-Dogs Laughed (from High Country Publishers), the fourth of his novels weaving together factual family history and richly imagined fiction about 19^th century Southern Appalachian life, Charles F. Price offers a beguiling tale of mortal love and loss and of mythic renewal, set against the backdrop of a traditional mountain culture beset by irrevocable change.

Gail E. Haley:

Gail E. Haley is a winner of both the Caldecott Medal for A STORY, A STORY and a Kate Greenway Award in England for A Postoffice Cat. Her books include: The Green Man, Mountain Jack Tales (a recent reprint from Parkway Publishers) and her latest a children's book about Kokopelli.

For more than 30 years Haley's award winning books have captured the hearts and minds of readers young and old.Throughout that time she has presented workshops, story telling, art demonstrations and puppetry programs in schools and libraries throughout the USA, Canada, England and Australia.

Gloria Houston:

Gloria Houston is best known, perhaps, as the author of The Year Of the Perfect Christmas Tree. Other books include: Bright Freedom's Song: A Story of the Underground Railroad, LittleJim's Gift and My Great Aunt Arizona.

Of Gloria Houston many awards include the 1990 Distinguished Alumni Award from Appalachian State University, the Forever-Young Author Award, the Women Helping Women Art/Humanities Award and the National Literacy Award. She also served as the Associate Producer in the film adaptation of her book, The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree.

When asked why she chose to write Appalachian children's stories, Dr. Gloria Houston responded, "Write what you know...and so I do." She was born and raised in Avery County, North Carolina. Many of the stories she writes are about her family and that part of the country. She is currently Author in Residence, Western Carolina University.