Melissa Fay Greene

Praying for Sheetrock

The 1992 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented to Melissa Fay Greene for Praying for Sheetrock. Praying for Sheetrock is set in McIntosh County, an area in the backwoods of Georgia that somehow remained untouched by the nation-wide changes of the civil rights movement a decade before. Greene tells the story of one uneducated, unemployed black man, Thurnell Alston, who challenged the white sheriff and his courthouse gang, thereby changing the way of life in this community forever.

Melissa Fay Greene is an award-winning author and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek. She is also the author of Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster and the forthcoming There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury Press). She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.