Calendar of Events

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

From athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick to musician Fela Kuti, explorer Matthew Henson and writer Chinua Achebe, there are so many inspirational men in Black history. This lyrical, rhythmic texts encourages boys to imagine everything they can be and the great things they can do, drawing on the strength of people throughout history that paved the way for Black boys.

It tells today’s boys: you have the courage, you are the light. It’s a new day! Be inspired and motivated by drawing on the history of the role models that came before you.

Dear boy, Black boy, I believe in you so.

Let’s start your story–ready, set, go.

Contributor Bios

ALI BIKO SULAIMAN KAMANDA is an award-winning filmmaker and social entrepreneur from Sierra Leone, West Africa. He runs BIKO Studios, a cross-cultural film production company and is the President of Salone Rising, a not-for-profit organization that provides micro-financing and mentoring resources to small business owners in rural Sierra Leone.

JORGE REDMOND currently works in the Buncombe County District Attorney’s office as an Assistant District Attorney, and as an adjunct professor in South College’s Legal Department. Ali and Jorge are college friends, and Black Boy, Black Boy is their debut book.

KEN DALEY is an award-winning artist from Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. He believes that diverse stories are essential to creating a more just, and equitable world, and is known for his use of bold colors and authentic details to depict Black Life in all its iterations.

Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 8 PM ET. 

Join us for a virtual evening with Colson Whitehead celebrating the paperback release of Harlem Shuffle, in conversation with Adam Serwer.

This event is presented by Books & Books/Miami Book Fair + indie bookstore partners including Malaprop’s.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Tickets are $17.00 each (plus applicable tax and shipping) and include:
♦ A paperback copy of Harlem Shuffle: A Novel (unsigned)
♦ A link to access the live event on Zoom.
Purchase below. 

Please make sure you submit the correct email address with your ticket purchase and that your email filters will allow messages from addresses @malaprops.com. The link required to attend will be emailed to you prior to the event.

NOTE: Books bundled with event tickets may be shipped ONLY to United States addresses. Books will not be shipped before publication date, August 9, 2022. Postal delivery times vary.

Please email [email protected] with questions.

We look forward to seeing you online on August 9th!

Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked… To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver’s Row don’t approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it’s still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. Cash is tight, especially with all those installment-plan sofas, so if his cousin Freddie occasionally drops off the odd ring or necklace, Ray doesn’t ask where it comes from. He knows a discreet jeweler downtown who doesn’t ask questions, either. Then Freddie falls in with a crew who plan to rob the Hotel Theresa–the Waldorf of Harlem–and volunteers Ray’s services as the fence. The heist doesn’t go as planned; they rarely do. Now Ray has a new clientele, one made up of shady cops, vicious local gangsters, two-bit pornographers, and other assorted Harlem lowlifes.

Thus begins the internal tussle between Ray the striver and Ray the crook. As Ray navigates this double life, he begins to see who actually pulls the strings in Harlem. Can Ray avoid getting killed, save his cousin, and grab his share of the big score, all while maintaining his reputation as the go-to source for all your quality home furniture needs?

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

COLSON WHITEHEAD is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, he lives in New York City.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer for the Ideas section of The Atlantic and the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collection The Cruelty Is The Point. He was previously the national editor at BuzzFeed News, a national reporter for MSNBC, and a reporter for Mother Jones. He is the recipient of the 2019 Hillman Prize for commentary and analysis, the 2015 Sigma Delta Chi Award for online column writing, The 2020 Vernon Jarrett Medal, and the 2019 National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award for magazine commentary.

Hosted by the Asheville Art Museum, this monthly discussion is a place to exchange ideas about readings that relate to artworks and the art world and to learn from and about each other. Meetings will take place in person at the Art Museum on the second Wednesday of the month at noon. Please click here and scroll to the current month and year to see what the club is reading this month.

Join us for a conversation with Jo Ann Thomas Croom and Katey Schultz discussing the ways in which the Toe River Valley informs and inspires their writing. The conversation will be moderated by Jim Stokely.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance. 

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Step back in time to the early 1900s and enter the sparsely settled Toe River Valley in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, a region still only slowly healing from the deep ravages of the Civil War. Life is centered in small insulated communities made up of subsistence farm families, one of which is the A.H. and Maggie Silver Thomas family. Both the Thomas and Silver families can trace their ancestors in the Valley back for five generations, and both their histories are first recorded by their son, Monroe, a teacher who is home-bound by illness. From his cot in the living room, Monroe watches as the entry of the railroad changes life into a wage-earner economy. He keeps an account of farm and community life in his journals while continuing to further educate himself through avid reading and thinking. His younger brother Walter, also an educator, provides a retrospective view of the time and place through the age-old practice of telling stories to illustrate truth. Together, these two accounts have been pieced together by Walter’s daughter, Jo Ann Thomas Croom, into a mosaic quilt that gives us a fresh in-depth look into a turbulent period of change – change that upended personal lives as well as the socioeconomic culture of the Valley. While this is the story of one particular family, it represents a microcosm of the history of the region.

Jo Ann Thomas Croom was born in Mitchell County, North Carolina, where her parents were life-long educators in the public school system.  After graduating from Harris High School in Spruce Pine, Jo Ann attended Mars Hill College for two years.  She then earned BS and MS degrees in Chemistry and Microbiology from North Carolina State University.  She worked as a chemist for Chemstrand Research in Triangle Park, then moved to Asheville with her husband Richard Croom and began a family. In the Asheville area, Jo Ann taught at Asheville Biltmore College, Warren Wilson College, Saint Genevieve’s Academy, and Homewood School at Highland Hospital. After the family moved to Mars Hill in Madison County, Jo Ann began a forty-year career at Mars Hill University. She earned a PhD in human genetics at the University of Tennessee Biomedical Program.  In retirement, Jo Ann has been working with written materials inherited from her father Walter Thomas and her uncle Monroe Thomas.

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which the Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel, both published by Loyola University Maryland. Honors for her work include North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, the Linda Flowers Literary Award, Doris Betts Fiction Prize, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, gold and silver medals from the Military Writers Society of America, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award, five Pushcart nominations, a nomination to Best American Short Stories, National Indies Excellence recognition, and writing fellowships in eight states. She lives in Celo, North Carolina, and is the founder of Maximum Impact, a transformative mentoring service for creative writers that has been recognized by both CNBC and the What Works Network.

Jim Stokely grew up in Newport, Tennessee and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University with exceptional distinction in American Studies.   He later received an MBA from Stanford University, and embarked upon a 25-year corporate career in Human Resources for The Hay Group, Brown-Forman Corporation, and Sylvania.  In 2011 he and his wife Anne moved back to the southern mountains and now live in Weaverville, North Carolina.  As President of the Wilma Dykeman Legacy, Jim produces local lecture series and other events in order to sustain the values of Wilma Dykeman. He is the author of Constant Defender: The Story of Fort Moultrie, co-author of Mountain Home: A Pictorial History of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, co-editor of An Encyclopedia of East Tennessee, and editor of An Appalachian Studies Teacher’s Manual as well as Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Step back in time to the early 1900s and enter the sparsely settled Toe River Valley in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, a region still only slowly healing from the deep ravages of the Civil War. Life is centered in small insulated communities made up of subsistence farm families, one of which is the A.H. and Maggie Silver Thomas family. Both the Thomas and Silver families can trace their ancestors in the Valley back for five generations, and both their histories are first recorded by their son, Monroe, a teacher who is home-bound by illness. From his cot in the living room, Monroe watches as the entry of the railroad changes life into a wage-earner economy. He keeps an account of farm and community life in his journals while continuing to further educate himself through avid reading and thinking. His younger brother Walter, also an educator, provides a retrospective view of the time and place through the age-old practice of telling stories to illustrate truth. Together, these two accounts have been pieced together by Walter’s daughter, Jo Ann Thomas Croom, into a mosaic quilt that gives us a fresh in-depth look into a turbulent period of change – change that upended personal lives as well as the socioeconomic culture of the Valley. While this is the story of one particular family, it represents a microcosm of the history of the region.

Jo Ann Thomas Croom was born in Mitchell County, North Carolina, where her parents were life-long educators in the public school system.  After graduating from Harris High School in Spruce Pine, Jo Ann attended Mars Hill College for two years.  She then earned BS and MS degrees in Chemistry and Microbiology from North Carolina State University.  She worked as a chemist for Chemstrand Research in Triangle Park, then moved to Asheville with her husband Richard Croom and began a family. In the Asheville area, Jo Ann taught at Asheville Biltmore College, Warren Wilson College, Saint Genevieve’s Academy, and Homewood School at Highland Hospital. After the family moved to Mars Hill in Madison County, Jo Ann began a forty-year career at Mars Hill University. She earned a PhD in human genetics at the University of Tennessee Biomedical Program.  In retirement, Jo Ann has been working with written materials inherited from her father Walter Thomas and her uncle Monroe Thomas.

Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which the Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel, both published by Loyola University Maryland. Honors for her work include North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, the Linda Flowers Literary Award, Doris Betts Fiction Prize, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award, gold and silver medals from the Military Writers Society of America, the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award, five Pushcart nominations, a nomination to Best American Short Stories, National Indies Excellence recognition, and writing fellowships in eight states. She lives in Celo, North Carolina, and is the founder of Maximum Impact, a transformative mentoring service for creative writers that has been recognized by both CNBC and the What Works Network.

Jim Stokely grew up in Newport, Tennessee and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University with exceptional distinction in American Studies.   He later received an MBA from Stanford University, and embarked upon a 25-year corporate career in Human Resources for The Hay Group, Brown-Forman Corporation, and Sylvania.  In 2011 he and his wife Anne moved back to the southern mountains and now live in Weaverville, North Carolina.  As President of the Wilma Dykeman Legacy, Jim produces local lecture series and other events in order to sustain the values of Wilma Dykeman. He is the author of Constant Defender: The Story of Fort Moultrie, co-author of Mountain Home: A Pictorial History of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, co-editor of An Encyclopedia of East Tennessee, and editor of An Appalachian Studies Teacher’s Manual as well as Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

From the instant New York Times bestselling author of The Nature of Witches comes an enemies-to-lovers fantasy romance about a young witch attempting to undo a terrible curse.

Iris Gray knows witches aren’t welcome in most towns. When she was forced to leave her last home after an illegal display of magic, she left behind a father who was no longer willing to start over. And while the Witches’ Council was lenient in their punishment, Iris knows they’re keeping tabs on her.
Now settled in Washington, Iris she vents her frustrations by writing curses she never intends to cast and spends her days at the wildlife refuge with a witch-hating intern, Pike Adler.
Iris concocts the perfect curse for Pike: one that will turn him into a witch. But just as she’s about to dispel it, a bird steals the curse before flying away. If the bird dies, the curse will be unleashed and turn not just Pike, but everyone in the region, into a witch.
Iris begs Pike to help her track the bird, and they set out on a trek through the Pacific Northwest…and find they may like each other’s company more than they want to admit.

RACHEL GRIFFIN lives just outside of Seattle with her husband and dog, Doppler. She became a certified weather spotter for the National Weather Service while doing research for her New York Times bestselling debut The Nature of Witches. Visit her online at rachelgriffinbooks.com.

Isabel Ibañez is the author of Woven in Moonlight, Together We Burn, and Written in Starlight, a finalist for the William C. Morris Award, and is listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time. She was born in Boca Raton, Florida, and is the proud daughter of two Bolivian immigrants. Isabel has a profound appreciation for history and traveling and loves hosting family and friends around the dinner table. She currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her husband, their adorable dog, and a serious collection of books. Say hi on social media!

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

A young maid at an upscale resort hides her banjo-playing freight hopper brother. An unlikely romance bridges a quarter-century age gap and a 150-year-old murder. A man tries to turn his sheltered mother’s backyard shed into a pricey vacation rental. A gig worker must shake off her darker identity to become a professional baby namer. This mesmeric debut collection of stories set in the Appalachian mountains weaves together the curious and the sublime, with Bianchi’s lyrical style cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

Melanie McGee Bianchi grew up in a series of character-forming historic houses in different parts of the U.S. Starting at age 12, she gathered modest notice on the spelling-bee circuit, won short-story contests in various newspapers, and placed poems and fiction in national print publications, including the grunge-era teen magazine Sassy. After university, she began a career in features journalism in Asheville, North Carolina, where she has lived most of her life. Melanie was the lead arts reporter and Arts & Entertainment Editor at Mountain Xpress, a member paper of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, for ten years. She interviewed celebrities of many genres, including Loretta Lynn, David Sedaris, Aimee Mann, the late R.L. Burnside, and the late Doc Watson. In 2004, she won an industry Gold Award for special-section editing.After five happy years as a stay-at-home mom, Melanie next edited VERVE, a women’s magazine, for a period in the 2010s, working with Venezuelan fashion photographer Zaire Kacz and model/stylist Sara Fields Bridges. Melanie currently manages three regional lifestyle publications: Asheville Made, Bold Life, and Carolina Home + Garden. Her humor essays have been published regionally and nationally, and her poetry has been shortlisted in national chapbook contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Melanie’s current fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review’s Summer Prize Issue, in Chattahoochee Review, and in The Moth Magazine (based in Co. Cavan, Ireland). These pieces and more are included in her first book, The Ballad of Cherrystoke + Other Stories, forthcoming from Blackwater Press in 2022.

Alli Marshall is a poet, performer, writer, editor, film maker and creative community builder. She’s interested in moving writing beyond the page, seeking the golden in the mundane, finding the intersection of art and social justice, and reconnecting with mythology — both ancient and modern.

This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.

Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

A young maid at an upscale resort hides her banjo-playing freight hopper brother. An unlikely romance bridges a quarter-century age gap and a 150-year-old murder. A man tries to turn his sheltered mother’s backyard shed into a pricey vacation rental. A gig worker must shake off her darker identity to become a professional baby namer. This mesmeric debut collection of stories set in the Appalachian mountains weaves together the curious and the sublime, with Bianchi’s lyrical style cutting straight to the heart of the matter.

Melanie McGee Bianchi grew up in a series of character-forming historic houses in different parts of the U.S. Starting at age 12, she gathered modest notice on the spelling-bee circuit, won short-story contests in various newspapers, and placed poems and fiction in national print publications, including the grunge-era teen magazine Sassy. After university, she began a career in features journalism in Asheville, North Carolina, where she has lived most of her life. Melanie was the lead arts reporter and Arts & Entertainment Editor at Mountain Xpress, a member paper of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, for ten years. She interviewed celebrities of many genres, including Loretta Lynn, David Sedaris, Aimee Mann, the late R.L. Burnside, and the late Doc Watson. In 2004, she won an industry Gold Award for special-section editing.After five happy years as a stay-at-home mom, Melanie next edited VERVE, a women’s magazine, for a period in the 2010s, working with Venezuelan fashion photographer Zaire Kacz and model/stylist Sara Fields Bridges. Melanie currently manages three regional lifestyle publications: Asheville Made, Bold Life, and Carolina Home + Garden. Her humor essays have been published regionally and nationally, and her poetry has been shortlisted in national chapbook contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Melanie’s current fiction has appeared in The Mississippi Review’s Summer Prize Issue, in Chattahoochee Review, and in The Moth Magazine (based in Co. Cavan, Ireland). These pieces and more are included in her first book, The Ballad of Cherrystoke + Other Stories, forthcoming from Blackwater Press in 2022.

Alli Marshall is a poet, performer, writer, editor, film maker and creative community builder. She’s interested in moving writing beyond the page, seeking the golden in the mundane, finding the intersection of art and social justice, and reconnecting with mythology — both ancient and modern.

Join us for a special Miss Malaprop’s Storytime featuring author and illustrator Wallace West!

This is a free event, but registration is required. Click here to register. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.

If you decide to attend and to purchase books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

In this clever twist on a traditional tale, a boy who loves his frilly, swishy riding hood turns the tables on a big, bad, bullying wolf!
Better not mess with Little Red when he’s got on his favorite frilly red riding hood! It makes him feel happier than a pig in mud, more special than a birthday cake, and mighty as a firecracker. Nothing’s gonna stop him from being himself…Not even a big ol’ bully of a WOLF! With admirable spunk and a heaping helping of southern humor and hospitality, Little Red finds a way to crack the shell of the closed-minded wolf’s perception of frills and bows.
This refreshingly spirited version of the classic tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” explores the challenge of staying on your path when confronted by strangers who don’t want to understand you.

Wallace West is a native Texan and world explorer. Wallace says “I once foolishly pet a wild alligator and consider a tinned-fish picnic in Norway the best meal I’ve ever had. By day I work in advertising. By night my beagle and I wonder if the house is haunted.”