Wiley Cash hosts Visiting Writers Series at UNC Asheville

PRESS RELEASE:

Wiley Cash, returning to his alma mater as writer-in-residence for 2016-17, will host the UNC Asheville Visiting Writers Series, bringing a variety of authors to campus for public readings and discussions. The series begins with Ben Fountain, author of the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, scheduled to be released as a movie this fall.

Fountain will offer his reading, free and open to the public, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 22, in UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center. Author Leigh Ann Henion, also a UNC Asheville alumna, will read as part of this series on Nov. 10; poet Camille Dungy and novelist Chinelo Okparanta will visit campus during the spring semester.

“I couldn’t be more thrilled to return to UNC Asheville and Western North Carolina, an institution and region that have played such important roles in my development as a fiction writer. It will be my honor to be in the classroom this fall while offering students and community members the opportunity to engage with influential writers over the course of the academic year,” said Cash.

“In bringing Wiley back to our classrooms as writer-in-residence and inviting visiting writers to campus, we are inspiring our students to find their voices, to draw from their experiences here at UNC Asheville and in Western North Carolina, and to expand their horizons. It’s the opportunity to learn from world-renowned authors, to have conversations about the creative writing process, and of course, hear from their current work,” said UNC Asheville Provost Joseph Urgo.

Fountain’s satiric novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, set in Texas during the war in Iraq, won the National Book Critics Award and was a National Book Award finalist. The book was called “the Catch-22 of the Iraq war” by novelist and Marine Corps veteran Karl Marlantes. A movie based on Fountain’s novel and directed by Oscar-winner Ang Lee will be released in November.

Fountain, a North Carolina native who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and then Duke University Law School, worked as an attorney before focusing full-time on his writing. His first book, the short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Henion will read at noon on Nov. 10 in the Laurel Forum in Karpen Hall. She is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir released last year, Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurers Guide to the Natural World. Her essays and articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Orion, and multiple editions of The Best American Travel Writing. Like Cash, Henion is a year-2000 graduate of UNC Asheville.

Cash is the author of two best-selling novels, This Dark Road to Mercy, which was a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, and A Land More Kind than Home, which won the Western North Carolina Historical Association’s Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year award. Cash, who earned a master’s degree at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from UNC Asheville in 2015.

For more information, visit english.unca.edu.