Friends of the Knox County Public Library

Archived Event

Please join the East Tennessee Historical Society and Friends of the Knox County Public Library for an evening with award-winning Southern author Sharyn McCrumb on Wednesday, May 25, at 7 p.m. at the East Tennessee History Center. The event is free and open to the public.

A light reception will precede the event at 6:30 p.m., and books will be available for purchase and signing.

McCrumb will discuss her new Ballad novel, Prayers the Devil Answers. The novel tells the story of Ellie Robbins, who is appointed to serve out the term of her late husband as sheriff of their rural Tennessee mountain town. The year is 1936, and her role is largely symbolic, except for the one task that only a sheriff can do: execute a convicted prisoner.

The Ballad series includes the New York Times bestsellers The Ballad of Tom Dooley, She Walks These Hills, and The Rosewood Casket.

McCrumb, whose books celebrate the history and folklore of Appalachia, was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Virginia Tech. She lives and writes in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, fewer than 100 miles from where her family settled in 1790.