Ron Rash, 12th Annual Jack Higgs Memorial Reading
Schedule
Wed, 22 Apr, 2026 at 07:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Bud Frank Theatre | Johnson City, TN
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The Mockingbird, East Tennessee State University's student-created art and literature magazine, presents our twelfth annual Robert "Jack" Higgs reading as part of the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative Spring Literary Festival. Professor Higgs, among many notable achievements at ETSU, served as the first faculty sponsor of The Mockingbird.Rash's reading will take place on Wednesday, April 22nd at 7 PM in the Bud Frank Theatre.
Ron Rash is a New York Times best-selling author of short fiction, poetry and many award-winning novels. He is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. His newest book, The Caretaker, was published in September 2023 by Doubleday and named one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. This last book brings his body of work up to 21 books: 8 novels, 7 short story collections, 5 poetry collections, and 1 reader/miscellany. He has been awarded the O. Henry Prize three times, and his books have been published in 21 countries and translated into 17 languages. In fall 2024, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Hailed as “one of the great American authors at work today” (New York Times), Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestseller Serena, in addition to The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and six collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Rash’s 2010 short story collection, Burning Bright, was selected for the National Endowment of the Arts NEA Big Read Library. The collection is “a slender set of spare and menacing depictions of the unforgiving ways of life in rural Appalachia,” noted the Washington Post. It “finds a narrow sweet spot between Raymond Carver’s minimalism and William Faulkner’s Gothic.” Highlighting the “purity and precision” of Rash’s writing, Booklist calls the stories “deceptively easy to read as they are hard to forget.”
Though the 12 stories in Burning Bright cover a wide swath of time from the Civil War to the present day, collectively they tell a story about Appalachia. And though they take us along the winding roads to the old homesteads and subdivisions of the American South, where “the region is a character in and of itself” and “myths and legends and history permeate every story” (BookPage), they also pulse with universal human emotions.
A son of Buncombe and Watauga County natives, Rash was raised in Boiling Springs North Carolina, and his family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains since the mid-1700s. He teaches at Western Carolina University.
https://www.etsu.edu/cas/litlang/writingfestival/spring-literary/speaker.php
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Where is it happening?
Bud Frank Theatre, Johnson City, Tennessee, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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