Hal Crowther has filed personal essays on culture, media, politics, natural history, and unnatural humanity. His collection Gather at the River was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism, and his essay collection, Cathedrals of Kudzu, received the Lillian Smith Book Award and the 2001 Book of the Year award from Foreword. Crowther’s work also appears in several anthologies, including Scoring from Second: Baseball from Life. He lives in North Carolina with his wife, the novelist Lee Smith.