Inner Islands

This book looks at some of the state's least-known special places. Blending history, oral history, autobiography, and travel narrative, Bland Simpson explores the islands that lie in the sounds, rivers, and swamps of North Carolina's inner coast. In each of the fifteen chapters in the book, Simpson covers a single island or group of islands, many of which, were it not for the buffering Outer Banks, would be lost to the ebbs and flows of the Atlantic. Instead they are home to unique plant and animal species and well-established hardwood forests, and many retain intriguing vestiges of an earlier human history.

Bland Simpson is author of Into the Sound Country, The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, The Great Dismal, and Heart of the Country. A member of the Tony Award-winning Red Clay Ramblers, Simpson has collaborated on such musicals as King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running, Kudzu, and Broadway and international hit Fool Moon. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.