Ron Rash, Charles Frazier and Wayne Caldwell will be among a group of southern writers to speak at the Summer Authors Speakers Series in the Manheimer Room at UNC-Asheville’s Reuter Center. The sessions are from 3 to 4:30 p.m. on Sundays, starting July 1 and are open to the public, free of charge.

• Tommy Hays begins the series with a talk on July 1. Hays is best known for his acclaimed novels, In the Family Way and The Pleasure Was Mine.

• Charles Frazier, a Western North Carolina native who gained fame with his novel Cold Mountain, will speak on July 8. Cold Mountain won the National Book Award for Fiction and was adapted into an award-winning, critically acclaimed film. His subsequent novels Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods are also set in the Appalachian Mountains.

• Wayne Caldwell, also a native of Asheville, will speak on July 15. His novel Cataloochee is part of a post-Civil War saga followed by Requiem by Fire, which chronicles a close-knit mountain village’s fight to keep its land.

• Ron Rash, whose novel Serena is being adapted for film, will speak on July 22. Serena was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. His latest novel is The Cove.

• Erica Abrams Locklear, who focuses on Appalachian women and literacy, will speak on July 29. Locklear is the author of Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies.

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