Join us for a conversation with John Vercher, inaugural Wilma Dykeman Writer-in-Residence at UNC Asheville, and Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author and Alumni Author-in-Residence at UNC Asheville.
This is a hybrid event with limited in-store seating and the option to attend online. The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.
This event includes a book signing. If you would like a signed book but can't attend in person, you may order a signed copy online below. If you would like to have your book personalized, please order online or call the store at least two hours before the start of the event. When ordering online, use the comments field to provide a name for personalization, e.g. “To Paul.” NOTE: We do our best to get books personalized when requested but personalization is not guaranteed.
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John Vercher is the inaugural Wilma Dykeman Writer-in-Residence at UNC Asheville. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. His debut novel, “Three-Fifths”, in which a savage hate crime impels a young man toward a deeper reckoning with his biracial identity, received starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune, and has sold in seven countries. In the U.K., “Three-Fifths” was named a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and The Guardian.
Vercher’s second novel, “After the Lights Go Out,” was published by Soho Press in 2022 and has been called “simply brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review and “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times. BookRiot selected the novel as a 2022 Best Book of the Summer; Publishers Weekly included it in their Summer Reads 2022 list; and Booklist named it an Editors’ Choice in Adult Fiction for 2022.
His forthcoming work, “Devil is Fine,” will be published in 2024. Learn more at https://www.johnvercherauthor.com/.
Wiley Cash is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of four novels and the founder of This Is Working. He has published widely on issues ranging from the environment to history to foodways to music. He serves as the Alumni Author-in-Residence at UNC-Asheville and lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their daughters. Published in September 2021, Cash’s novel When Ghosts Come Home was a national bestseller. In 2017, Cash’s novel The Last Ballad was an American Library Association Book of the Year and a Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017. His second novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, was a national bestseller and received the Crime Writers Association’s Novel of the Year in the United Kingdom. Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, won the Thomas Wolfe Book Prize, the Maine Reader’s Choice Award, the Southern Book Prize, the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, the Appalachian Writers Association’s Book of the Year, the Crime Writers Association’s Debut of the Year in the UK. Learn more at https://www.wileycash.com/.
The Wilma Dykeman Writer-in-Residence Program is open to writers whose work embodies a passion for equity and inclusion and demonstrates a commitment to social, racial, environmental and/or gender justice. The selection committee was chaired by Wiley Cash, award-winning author and UNC Asheville Writer-in-Residence, and includes: Susan Andrew, development manager for RiverLink; Mildred Barya, UNC Asheville assistant professor of English; and novelists Elizabeth Kostova and Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle.
Wilma Dykeman was a celebrated writer, speaker, activist and teacher. Born near Asheville, North Carolina, she became a ground-breaking environmentalist, a pioneering civil rights reporter, a best-selling novelist, and a founder of Appalachian Studies.
Her accomplishments and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sidney Hillman Award, the first woman trustee of Berea College, a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first woman Tennessee State Historian, membership in the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, and membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
The Wilma Dykeman Legacy was founded as a non-profit organization in 2012 to honor Wilma Dykeman’s extraordinary life and to sustain her core values of environmental integrity, social justice, and the power of the written and spoken word.
