Wiley Cash, best-selling chronicler of the South, chooses a side
The best-selling writer from North Carolina says a bigger platform comes with the responsibility "to tell hard truths" about politics, the environment, and race.
The best writers understand that there's the personal and the political, and not much difference between the two. Wiley Cash, one of the most celebrated Southern writers of the last 20 years, is one of those writers.
In 2025, when he was presented in Asheville with the North Carolina Award, the state's highest civilian honor, Cash didn't waste the platform.
"Every time somebody put a camera or a microphone in front of me, I talked about Hurricane Helene and recovery and the federal government holding onto those funds," he says. "That's all I wanted to talk about."
Helene turned everything into rivers and mudslides. In the years since the storm made landfall, the Trump administration has been widely criticized for its stinginess with federal recovery dollars in NC.
"What Donald Trump does is he lies and he creates nonfiction out of fiction. And he's preying on the same people, the same people that Jim Bakker preyed on. I mean, it's not a Venn diagram, it's a circle. It's the same people."
The irony is thick. Before the 2024 election, Trump made political theater out of the storm, claiming then-President Biden and Democrats were abandoning western NC. Now, two years after the storm has passed, Trump's administration has provided only about 16% of the needed recovery money.
Billy Ball
Some folks would have soaked in the adoration from the North Carolina Award. They would have avoided politics altogether. But Cash says a bigger platform comes with responsibility.
"I think the artist's responsibility is always to tell the truth," he says, "and to tell hard truths, and maybe make them palatable to a reader who is able to sit with them instead of having them delivered at a county commission meeting or by, you know, an environmental group or a historical society."
Cash's books have told hard truths better than most. Few can draw a bead on desperate people better than him.
He's set all four of his bestselling books in North Carolina. Write what you know, they say, and Cash knows the state intimately. He was raised in Gastonia, one of three children brought up in the culturally conservative Southern Baptist church. His father was a pharmacist. His mother was a nurse. His grandfather was a compulsive storyteller—and a liar, Cash jokes—who worked in the mills in Enoree, SC.
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