"I write historical fiction about ordinary people confronted by extraordinary events in the past.  I am interested in history not simply for its own sake, but as it sheds light on the problems and issues of today.  Ignorance of the past and the lessons it can teach are like a collective amnesia, which can lead a nation into otherwise avoidable and sometimes calamitous error."
                              Charles F. Price

Charles F. Price is the author of the Hiwassee series, four works of historical fiction set in his
native Western North Carolina which comprise a single narrative cycle interweaving the partly
imagined private history of his 19^th-century ancestors with the public history of the
Southern Appalachians.

His first book, Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War, appeared in 1996.  His second,
Freedom’s Altar, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award as the best fiction of 1999 written
by a North Carolina author. The Cock’s Spur, his third title, received an Independent
Publisher Book Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Books of 2001 and Price was
named Story Teller of the Year; it also won the Historical Fiction Award of the North
Carolina Society of Historians.  The last in the series, Where the Water-Dogs Laughed,
was released in 2003.  It also garnered the Society of Historians’ award, was a nominee
for a second Sir Walter Raleigh Award and was a first finalist for the Independent Publisher
Book Award for historical fiction that year.

Price is a native of Haywood County, NC and is descended on both sides of his family from some of the earliest settlers in the mountains of Western North Carolina.  His fifth work, a novel of the Revolutionary War in the South entitled Nor the Battle to the Strong, is forthcoming in 2008.

Price has been a Washington lobbyist, management consultant, urban planner and journalist.  In 1995, after working for 19 years in the nation’s capital, he retired to Burnsville in his beloved North Carolina mountains to devote full time to writing.  He lives with his wife Ruth, her dog, and his own beloved cat.  He holds a Masters in Public Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an undergraduate degree in History and Political Science from High Point University.

Additional Information:
          an article in Western North Carolina Woman's Y Chromosome issue
          a more comprehensive interview with Lacey Presnell