Sandra Muse IsaacsEnglish professor Sandra Muse Isaacs has won the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Prize.

Wednesday reading to celebrate literary prize win

UWindsor professor and alumna Sandra Muse Isaacs (BA 2000, MA 2002) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award from the Western North Carolina Historical Association for her 2019 book Eastern Cherokee Stories: A Living Oral Tradition and its Cultural Continuance.

The award has been presented annually since 1955 for printed works that focus special attention on Western North Carolina.

In Eastern Cherokee Stories, Dr. Muse Isaacs explores the Eastern Cherokee oral tradition, explaining how storytelling in this tradition — as both an ancient and a contemporary literary form — is instrumental in the perpetuation of Cherokee identity and culture.

The association will host an online reading by Muse Isaacs and the other finalists:

  • Leah Hampton, F*ckface and Other Stories
  • Susan E. Keefe and the Junaluska Heritage Association, Junaluska: Oral Histories of a Black Appalachian Community
  • Courtney Lewis, Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty
  • Rose McLarney, Laura-Gray Street, and L.L. Gaddy, editors, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia
  • Dale Neal, Appalachian Book of the Dead

at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 16. Register at wnchistory.org/events.