Among the Believers

Ron Rash's second book of poetry is based on the historical realities of the mountains of western North Carolina, where Mr. Rash's ancestry goes back for at least five generations. These skillfully crafted and highly compact poems capture the spirit and feeling, the beauty and cruelty, of a place and time which has now largely faded from the American Landscape.

Ron Rash's family has lived in the southern Appalachian mountains since the mid-1700's, and it is this region that is the primary focus of his writing. Rash grew up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, and graduated from Gardner-Webb College and Clemson University. He now lives in Clemson, South Carolina, with his wife and two children. He teaches English at Tri-County Technical College and teaches poetry at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts.

In 1987 his fiction won a General Electric Younger Writers Award and in 1994 he was awarded an NEA Poetry Fellowship. He was awarded the Sherwood Anderson Prize in 1996. His poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of journals, including Yale Review, Georgia Review, Oxford American, New England Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah and DoubleTake. He is the author of two books, The Night The New Jesus Fell to Earth, a collection of stories, and Eureka Mill, a collection of poems.