Spellbound, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction Series

In this award-winning memoir, a poet recalls his difficult childhood as the son of a poor lay preacher in a Pennsylvania mountain town.

In Spellbound, David McKain brings readers inside the secret world of a boy growing up in "God's Country," a small oil-drilling town in the Allegheny Mountains through the forties and fifties. His devoutly religious parents, overwhelmed by their own struggles, relinquished their son's upbringing to the town and the wooded slopes that encircled it.

Cutting school, straying from Boy Scouts, dropping out of church choir, McKain maneuvered away from control and into the joys and trials of adolescent discovery. Winner of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, Spellbound is an unforgettable story of a family enmeshed in tenderness and poverty, faith, and affliction.