Calendar of Events
Upcoming events and things to do in Asheville, NC. Below is a list of events for festivals, concerts, art exhibitions, group meetups and more.
Interested in adding an event to our calendar? Please click the green “Post Your Event” button below.
Introducing our ReadWNC series! Join the Western North Carolina Historical Association (WNCHA) for these three events. With authors and historians, we will explore the facts behind the fiction in these books centered in WNC. We encourage you to read the books in advance and bring your own questions to the discussion. You can find all three books at Malaprop’s Bookstore here in Asheville.
Each event airs live via Zoom, and will be recorded for later viewing. Register for individual events or for all three at a discounted rate!
The series dates are:
Tuesday, May 24 from 6:00-7pm – Even as We Breathe
Tuesday, July 19 from 6:00-7pm – Guests on Earth
Tuesday, October 4 from 6:00-7pm – The Ballad of Frankie Silver
Our series begins with the 2021 winner of our Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s novel Even As We Breathe. Dr. Catherine Frank, Chair of the award selection committee, says, “Even As We Breathe immerses us in a specific place and time, Asheville’s Grove Park Inn when it was being used to house Axis diplomats and their families in 1942, and in the Qualla Boundary where Cherokee traditions are deeply embedded but in conflict with an ever encroaching outside world. But the story of Cowney Sequoyah and Essie Stamper is also timeless and universal, exploring what it means to lose innocence and to find ‘who we are supposed to be.’ Most importantly, the book is beautifully written, with convincing, well-drawn characters and compelling imagery that tie the various stories together. This first novel by an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians exemplifies the quality of the most compelling regional writing.”
About the Presenters:
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and resides in Qualla, NC with her husband, Evan and sons Ross and Charlie. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe, was released by the University Press of Kentucky in 2020, a finalist for the Weatherford Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. In 2021, it received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water is winner of the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014). Clapsaddle’s work has appeared in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, South Writ Large and The Atlantic. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette returned to teaching at Swain County High School. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the board of trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.
Dr. Barbara R. Duncan received her Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. She coordinated “Folk Arts in the Schools” in Macon County for several years, worked for The Foxfire Fund, and went on to spend twenty-three years at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, where she wrote grants, researched, wrote books, and coordinated festivals and community-based programs to revitalize Cherokee traditions. Now retired from the Museum, Duncan teaches Cherokee language as Assistant Adjunct Professor at University of North Carolina Asheville. With a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, she has created a new method for learning Cherokee language and authored a series of textbooks and a website at www.yourgrandmotherscherokee.com. Duncan has written award-winning books about Cherokee history and culture, including Living Stories of the Cherokee, which received the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award and the World Storytelling Award; and The Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook (co-authored with Brett H. Riggs) which received the Presidential Preserve Freedom Award and the Willie Parker Peace Prize. Her most recent book is Cherokee Clothing in the 1700s, published by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.
Tickets: We hope you will register for the entire series, but individual event tickets are available as well. We also have two no-cost, community-funded tickets available per event.
—For this event only – $5 for WNCHA members/$10 for general admission
—For the entire series – $10 for WNCHA members/$20 for general admission
Note* For those registering for the entire series, you need only to register here once. You will be manually added to the upcoming events.
| We will be discussing The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune. This in-person discussion is limited to 10 people. Pre-registration is required. Please email [email protected] to registe |
Romance Book Club is a space to celebrate love in literature. Whether it’s set in early 1800s London, a distant planet years into the future, a fantasy world of magic, or our own contemporary universe, we are here for the stories that end with a happily-ever-after (or at least a happily-for-now).
Meetings will take place at 7:00 PM ET on the last Tuesday of each month via Zoom. Please visit the Romance Bookclub page for the monthly selection, and email Samantha at [email protected] for the link to join.
Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Patricia Furnish to discuss a range of books across true crime and public affairs. The club meets the first Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. Click here to learn more about the club, view important news, and find the pick for this month.
The Friends of the Enka-Candler Library Big Book Sale is back!
They’ll be hosting two days of sales from the Library community room. Stock up for summer and for the rest of the year. Plenty of deals on books you don’t want to miss from children’s books to adult, plus music, DVDs and tote bags.
All proceeds from the sale go back to the Enka-Candler Library from programs to furniture.
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Meta Commerse is a Blues Doula. A former professor of History and English, she’s an award-winning author. Among her works are short stories, essays, poetry, numerous newspaper articles, one stage play, her story medicine novel, The Mending Time, and memoir Womaning. She earned her MFA degree at Goddard College in Vermont. Meta is a social entrepreneur, creator of Story Medicine Worldwide, a community-based healing movement. She is a performing artist, singing jazz, blues, and gospel music. She is the mother of three adult children and grandmother to three young adult grandsons. |
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Chat with other book lovers about this month’s book selection.
Interested in reading ahead? Here’s what we have coming up in the next few months!
– November- “Once Upon A River” Diane Setterfield
– December- “Dutch House” Ann Patchett
– January- “Mexican Gothic” Silvia Moreno-Garcia
– February- “The Rose Code” Kate Quinn
To reserve your copy of the book, visit buncombe.nccardinal.org or swing by the library to pick one up from the book clubs holds shelf.
To join the book club email [email protected] or call us at 250-4758.
Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history—including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews.
Upon first seeing Twombly’s remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small—anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was.
Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly’s life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1994 MoMA retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death.
Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we’ve ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we’ve ever known.
DISCUSSION BOUND
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. Books are available at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café for a 10% discount. To add your name to our Discuss
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Join us in the Library community room for an informational session and Q&A with author, Jonathan Baurer.
He’ll be answering your questions and discussing his new book, Positive Parenting Solutions to Raise Highly Sensitive Children: Understanding Your Child’s Emotions and How to Respond with Radical Compassion, Love, and Confidence. Books will be available for purchase.
Bio:
Jonathan Baurer, author, certified life coach, and entrepreneur based out of Asheville, North Carolina, is the co-founder of Exploring Changes, a mindset life-coaching program and blended-publishing house. Jonathan helps clients achieve their highest goals and live the life of their dreams by bridging the gap between where they are, and where they want to be. Jonathan is the author of two bestselling non-fiction books, helping people live more fully in happiness and love. Jonathan is inspired by his passion of continued learning, living a life of adventure, and creating authentic connections with others.
This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Enka-Candler Library. All library programs are free and everyone is welcome. We hope you’ll join us
Join us for a used book sale on Saturday, June 11 from 10am to 3pm. Proceeds from the sale will benefit future programs and other assistance to the East Asheville Public Library.
Questions? E-mail [email protected].
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Let’s walk the Wilma Dykeman Greenway in the RAD. It’s a 2 mile paved trail along the French Broad. If we do the whole thing, it’ll be ~4 miles roundtrip. We’ll meet by the fish sculpture in the parking lot and plan to leave at 11:15. If people are interested, we can get food at White Duck Taco or Smoky Park Supper Club afterwards.
Join the Western North Carolina Historical Association (WNCHA) for the second of three events in our ReadWNC series! With authors and historians, we will explore the facts behind the fiction in these books centered in WNC. In this series, authors and historians explore the facts behind the fiction in books centered in WNC. We encourage you to read the books in advance and bring your own questions to the discussion. You can find all three books at Malaprop’s Bookstore here in Asheville. This event airs live via Zoom, Tuesday, July 19 from 6:00-7pm.
Our series continues with Lee Smith’s novel Guests on Earth, set at Asheville’s Highland Hospital during the period when Zelda Fitzgerald resided there, before she and eight other women perished in a terrible fire in 1948. Smith says: “In this novel I offer a solution for the unsolved mystery of that fire, along with a group of characters both imagined and real, and a series of events leading up to the tragedy. My narrator is a younger patient named Evalina Toussaint, daughter of a New Orleans exotic dancer. Evalina is a talented pianist who connects to Zelda on many levels as she plays accompaniment for the many concerts, theatricals, and dances constantly being held at Highland Hospital.”
About the Presenters:
Dr. Alaina Doten is the executive director of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. She has a PhD in history and art history from the University of Melbourne.
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
UPDATE: This will be a fully virtual event. Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
If you decide to attend and purchase the authors’ 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!
All seventeen-year-old Maggie Warshauer wants is to leave her stifled life in Filliyaw Creek behind and head to college. An outsider at school and uncertain of her own sexual identity, Maggie longs to start again somewhere new. Inspired by a long-dead biologist’s journals, scientific-minded Maggie spends her days sailing, exploring, and categorizing life around her. But when her beautiful cousin Charisse disappears on prom night and is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives, Maggie’s plans begin to unravel. A mysterious stranger begins stalking her and a local detective on the case leaves her struggling to hold on to her secrets—her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s abandonment, a boyfriend who may or may not exist, and her own actions on prom night. As the detective gets closer to finding the truth, and Maggie’s stalker is closing in, she is forced to come to terms with the one person who might hold the answers—herself.
A former farmer, sailor, and journalist, Valerie Nieman is the author of five novels, one short story collection, three collections of poetry, and two poetry chapbooks. To the Bones, her genre-bending novel about Appalachia published by West Virginia University Press in 2019, was a finalist for the Manly Wade Wellman Award and the Killer Nashville Award. Her work has appeared in dozens of journals including Monkeybicycle, StorySouth, and The Georgia Review and received fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the NEA, among others. Nieman recently retired from teaching at North Carolina A&T. Learn more at valnieman.com.
Jamie Mason was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Washington, DC. She’s most often reading and writing, but in the life left over, she enjoys films, Formula 1 racing, football, traveling, and, conversely, staying at home. Jamie lives with her husband and two daughters in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is the author of Three Graves Full, Monday’s Lie, and The Hidden Things.
This club meets in-person and virtually. If you are interested in attending, please email [email protected] for more info and instructions!
Join host and Malaprop’s bookseller Patricia Furnish to discuss a range of books across different periods of history. The club tackles challenging subjects, hence “NOTORIOUS.” Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!
The club meets at Malaprop’s on the 3rd Thursday of every month at 7:00 pm.
Description: Known for her leadership with the national Foodscape movement and her lively, information packed presentations, Brie Arthur is a celebrated speaker and bestselling author. With two decades of experience as a professional horticulturist, propagator, and communicator Brie shares her expertise with audiences around the country and is a correspondent on the Emmy award winning PBS Television show “Growing a Greener World”. Follow Brie’s gardening journey through her YouTube channel, Brie the Plant Lady. One garden at a time, every little bit of habitat makes our world a better place.
Description: Known for her leadership with the national Foodscape movement and her lively, information packed presentations, Brie Arthur is a celebrated speaker and bestselling author. With two decades of experience as a professional horticulturist, propagator, and communicator Brie shares her expertise with audiences around the country and is a correspondent on the Emmy award winning PBS Television show “Growing a Greener World”. Follow Brie’s gardening journey through her YouTube channel, Brie the Plant Lady. One garden at a time, every little bit of habitat makes our world a better place.
Church of St. John in the Wilderness celebrates its patron saint with the Feast of St. John
the Baptist. In 2021, the historic church extended the festivities outside the parish to the
broader community and will do so again this year.
All are welcome to join the festivities at the family-friendly celebration featuring food,
fellowship and live music. “Since our earliest days in the 1800s, we have gathered with
friends and neighbors to fellowship and find renewal with God and one another,” Rector
Josh Stephens said. “The Feast of St. John is a time for our broader community to gather
and to reconnect.”
Local bluegrass band Pretty Little Goat will set the mood beginning at 6 p.m. and yard
games will be offered for children. Barbecue and other family-favorite foods and
beverages will be available for purchase at Hubba Hubba. Seating at the picturesque
outdoor courtyard is limited, so guests are encouraged to bring portable chairs.
"St. John in the Wilderness as a parish has deep roots in Flat Rock and this corner of
Western North Carolina,” Stephens said. “We are incredibly grateful to live in a place with
such natural beauty and with so many wonderful friends, parishioners, and neighbors.
The rain date is set for Wednesday, June 29 at 5:00pm at Hubba Hubba.
Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Allison to dive into the wreck of the wily and wonderful world of science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction, speculative fiction, and literary horror with a healthy mix of underappreciated classic and contemporary books. Meets the last Monday of every month at 7 pm on Zoom. Also meets on the second Monday of every month at 7 pm to discuss the film adaptations of the books we read. Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading and contact the club host to join. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Romance Book Club is a space to celebrate love in literature. Whether it’s set in early 1800s London, a distant planet years into the future, a fantasy world of magic, or our own contemporary universe, we are here for the stories that end with a happily-ever-after (or at least a happily-for-now).
Meetings will take place at 7:00 PM ET on the last Tuesday of each month via Zoom. Please visit the Romance Bookclub page for the monthly selection, and email Samantha at [email protected] for the link to join.
This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats 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 purchase the authors’ 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!
Self-taught photographer George Masa (born Masahara Iizuka in Osaka, Japan), arrived in Asheville, North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century amid a period of great transition in the southern Appalachians.
Masa’s photographs from the 1920s and early 1930s are stunning windows into an era where railroads hauled out the remaining old-growth timber with impunity, new roads were blasted into hillsides, and an activist community emerged to fight for a new national park. Masa began photographing the nearby mountains and helping to map the Appalachian Trail, capturing this transition like no other photographer of his time. His images, along with his knowledge of the landscape, became a critical piece of the argument for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, compelling John D. Rockefeller to donate $5 million for initial land purchases. Despite being hailed as the “Ansel Adams of the Smokies,” Masa died, destitute and unknown, in 1933.
In George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina, poet and environmental organizer Brent Martin explores the locations Masa visited, using first-person narratives to contrast, lament, and exalt the condition of the landscape the photographer so loved and worked to interpret and protect. The book includes seventy-five of Masa’s photographs, accompanied by Martin’s reflections on Masa’s life and work.
Brent Martin is the author of three chapbook collections of poetry and of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present. His poetry and essays have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Pisgah Review, Tar River Poetry, Chattahoochee Review, Eno Journal, New Southerner, Kudzu Literary Journal, Smoky Mountain News and elsewhere. He lives in the Cowee community in Western North Carolina, where he and his wife, Angela Faye Martin, run Alarka Institute.
The Foodie Book Club is a club about food writing. The club meets on the last Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM. Click here for details and monthly picks!
Join us in the temperature-controlled Arena to walk on most Tuesdays and Thursdays! Admission is free, masks are required and social distancing will be practiced.
Each lap around the concourse is 1/4 mile and strollers are welcome. Representatives from St. Francis Sports Medicine will be on hand for each event and other health professionals- like dietitians- are frequently scheduled to attend. Free parking is available in the VIP lot off of Church Street.
Malaprop’s is pleased to partner with UNC Press to present this event with Rebecca Sharpless. Kirk Brown will moderate.
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!
While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition.
Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship.
Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. Her most recent book is Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960.
The Rev. David C. (Kirk) Brown is the recently retired chaplain of Christ School. Kirk received his A.B. from Davidson College, his M.A. from the University of Virginia (Germanic Studies), and his M.Div. from Virginia Theological Seminary. Kirk is a member of the UNC Press Advancement Council and lives with his wife, Shelley, on a farm in Fletcher.
Take a 90-plus minute walk along Historic Main Street to learn about Hendersonville’s history and architecture and hear fascinating stories of the past. Be charmed and informed by Hendersonville’s history, architecture, and colorful stories. Learn how the town got its name, who donated the land, bordellos, the oldest block of buildings, amazing fires, trolley lines … and more. All walks begin at 10am and begin at Hendersonville City Hall, front steps (corner of 5th Ave. East and King Street).