Roswell Reads: Special Edition With Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina. He has been writing critically acclaimed, bestselling literary fiction for more than 25 years, work that has been translated into over two dozen languages. 

Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed 1997 first novel, became an international bestseller, won the National Book Award, the ABBY Award, the Heartland Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and was an American Library Association Notable Book. In 2003, Cold Mountain was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film and, in 2015, an opera based on the novel premiered. 

Thirteen Moons, published in 2006, was a New York Times bestseller. It won the 2007 SIBA Book Award and the 2007 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize and was named a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

Five years later, his third novel, Nightwoods, a highly regarded literary thriller set in a fictional Western North Carolina town in the early 1960s, also became a New York Times bestseller.

Frazier returned to the time and setting of Cold Mountainwith 2018’s Varina, a critically acclaimed instant New York Times bestseller. A reimagining of the life of Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the novel is set before, during and after the American Civil War. 

Frazier’s fifth novel, The Trackers, published in April 2023, paints a vivid portrait of life in the Great Depression. Set in Wyoming, Washington, Florida and California, The Trackers conjures up the lives of everyday people during an extraordinary period of history.

Dr. Gina Caison is the Kenneth M. England Associate Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University where she teaches courses in American literature, Indigenous literatures, Southern literatures, and documentary practices. From 2020-22, she served as president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and during the 2020-21 academic year, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest.

Her first book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies, won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in Southern literary studies. Along with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, she is co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South. She also serves as an associate general editor of the Broadview Anthology of American Literature. Her next book, Erosion: American Literature & the Anxiety of Disappearance, will be published by Duke University Press this fall.