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Local author wins natural heritage award
 Tuckasegee author Thomas Crowe has been awarded the 2006 Phillip D. Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center for “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”
The award, given annually for outstanding writing on the southern environment, seeks to enhance public awareness of the richness and vulnerability of the region’s natural heritage.
This is Crowe’s second award for “Zoro’s Field,” which also won the Ragan Old North State Award given by the N.C. Literary and Historical Association for the best book of non-fiction about North Carolina. Crowe was also a finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Awards for the book.
“For this prestigious award to have come from the legal side of the environmental movement means a lot, not only to me personally, but to the status and the future of the book as it goes into its first paperback edition,” said Crowe. “Hopefully, with this award, ‘Zoro’s Field’ will attract the attention of the legal, political and business communities, in addition to the grassroots folks, and make an impact there, where expanded awareness and right action is needed most.”
“We are delighted that Zoro’s Field has won the Phillip Reed Award,” said Nicole Mitchell, Director of the University of Georgia Press. “We’re honored that the SELC has recognized this work – a book that has really resonated with readers.”
“Zoro’s Field” is a memoir about four years Crowe spent living alone near Saluda in Polk County, surviving by his own hand without electricity, plumbing, transportation, or regular income. Numerous critics have compared the book to Thoreau’s “Walden” and praised Crowe’s simple but elegant writing style.
John Sledge, book review editor for The Mobile Register, called it “a Southern-fried version of Thoreau’s ethic ... Crowe does not expect everyone to unplug and head for the woods as he once did, but the lessons he learned contain valuable truths that we ignore at our peril.”
“For those of us who have a love affair with these southern mountains, this author speaks our language,” said Linda Willis of The Roanoke Times. “Crowe causes us to pause and reflect on how removed the majority of us have become from nature and what a continuing effect the growing population has on the finite, natural world.”
Crowe is the author of 11 books of original and translated works, as well as a poet, translator, editor, publisher, and recording artist.
“Zoro’s Field” will be available in paperback this fall from the University of Georgia Press. For more information visit online at www.ugapress.uga.edu.
For more information on the Reed Award, visit online at www.southernenvironment.org/newsroom/phil_reed/phil_reed_writing_award.htm.
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