Acclaimed Southern Gothic Author Wiley Cash Named 2025-2026 Patrick Henry History Fellow
Forthcoming novel will focus on a retelling of the lost colony of Roanoke Island; author to give a reading September 23.
Washington College's Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience is thrilled to announce the 2025-2026 Patrick Henry History Fellow, Wiley Cash, a best-selling author versed in southern history, mystery, and family drama.
Cash will be joining the Washington College community for the academic year and teaching an English class while also working on his sixth novel—in his words, “a retelling of the Lost Colony [of Roanoke Island, North Carolina] that braids three storylines while interrogating the tendrils of white supremacy that sprouted from the American colonial experiment.”
The Patrick Henry History Fellowship supports outstanding writing on American history and culture by scholars and authors; it offers a $45,000 stipend for the academic year and an opportunity to work with and teach Washington College students and faculty, as well as a book allowance and a nine-month residency in a historic 18th century house in Chestertown, Maryland. Past fellowship topics have ranged as broadly as the early history of the slave trade, American religious minorities, and the LGBTQ rights movement. Past Patrick Henry fellows have included National Book Prize winner Edward Ball and Scribe Book Award recipient Wil Haygood.
Cash is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of four novels, including A Land More Kind Than Home, This Dark Road to Mercy, and The Last Ballad. His last novel, published in 2021, When Ghosts Come Home, was a national bestseller and an Indie Next Pick. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Oxford American, Garden & Gun, Our State Magazine, and other publications, and his fiction has been adapted for the stage and film. His writing has been praised for its Southern dialect, Southern Gothic qualities, and blending of family drama with suspense. He often uses a multi-character perspective in his works, deploying a range of character voices to tell a richer, more nuanced story.
His work has won numerous awards, including the Southern Book Prize three times, and the Crime Writers' Association's CWA New Blood Dagger and Gold Dagger. He has published extensively on a range of issues, from the environment to music, and is the host of the Our State Book Club podcast and the founder of “This is Working,” an online creative community.
“Wiley's work perfectly embodies the Starr Center's approach to history,” said Starr Center Director Adam Goodheart. “He's an elegant writer and accomplished storyteller who reaches broad audiences, while also engaging in complex ways with some of the problems and paradoxes at the root of American identity. We're delighted to have him here with us and excited that our students will have the opportunity to learn from this nationally eminent fiction writer.”
In the spring, Cash will teach “Signifying on the South” for the College's English department, exploring popular literary portrayals of the American South, from well-known classics like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to more recent works like Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone. Considering the ways contemporary works amend and extend older texts, students will explore how today's Southern writers are creating new frameworks to perceive the American South not as a relic of a time, but as an organic and fluid landscape.
“I'm thrilled to serve as the 2025-2026 Patrick Henry Fellow,” said Cash. “My family and I spent a week in Chestertown this summer, and we can't wait to return to such a historic, kind, welcoming community."
Cash has been a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell artist retreats and teaches fiction writing and literature at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, an M.A. in English from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a B.A. in Literature from UNC Asheville. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, photographer Mallory Cash, and their daughters.
On Tuesday, September 23 at 6 p.m. at the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, Cash will read from his novel, The Last Ballad. The event is free and open to the public.
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- Christine Sinatra