Each year, the Department of English brings visiting writers across genres for readings and master classes with students, hosted by our Writer-in-Residence, Wiley Cash. In recent years, the department has hosted several award-winning writers, including Ben Fountain, Camille Dungy, David Ebershoff, Chrystal Hana Kim, Frank X Walker, and many others.
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.
Sunday, January
3, 2021
UNC Asheville Courses for Community Residents Great Smokies Writing Program
The GSWP, now celebrating its 20th year of workshops with some of Western North Carolina’s finest authors, is offering five-week, 10-week and 15-week courses including poetry, prose, feature-writing, editing and revision. These Spring 2021 Semester courses have start dates ranging from late January to mid March. Registration is now open, with course descriptions, instructor bios, cost information and more, available at greatsmokies.unca.edu.
Saturday, January
9, 2021
UNC Asheville Courses for Community Residents Great Smokies Writing Program
The GSWP, now celebrating its 20th year of workshops with some of Western North Carolina’s finest authors, is offering five-week, 10-week and 15-week courses including poetry, prose, feature-writing, editing and revision. These Spring 2021 Semester courses have start dates ranging from late January to mid March. Registration is now open, with course descriptions, instructor bios, cost information and more, available at greatsmokies.unca.edu.
Sunday, January
10, 2021
UNC Asheville Courses for Community Residents Great Smokies Writing Program
The GSWP, now celebrating its 20th year of workshops with some of Western North Carolina’s finest authors, is offering five-week, 10-week and 15-week courses including poetry, prose, feature-writing, editing and revision. These Spring 2021 Semester courses have start dates ranging from late January to mid March. Registration is now open, with course descriptions, instructor bios, cost information and more, available at greatsmokies.unca.edu.
Saturday, January
16, 2021
UNC Asheville Courses for Community Residents Great Smokies Writing Program
The GSWP, now celebrating its 20th year of workshops with some of Western North Carolina’s finest authors, is offering five-week, 10-week and 15-week courses including poetry, prose, feature-writing, editing and revision. These Spring 2021 Semester courses have start dates ranging from late January to mid March. Registration is now open, with course descriptions, instructor bios, cost information and more, available at greatsmokies.unca.edu.
Sunday, January
17, 2021
FREE Random Acts of Fringe: Flying Solo Workshop Writing
Writers at Home
One of the most unique things about The Asheville Fringe Arts Festival is our Random Acts of Fringe. These short, site-specific performances are mostly free and open to the public. This year, most of our RAFs are happening on social media, so be sure to follow us there for more information about these shows.
The Writers at Home reading series features work from UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program and The Great Smokies Review. RSVP here to receive an email on the day of the event with the link you’ll need to attend.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you are supporting our work and keeping more dollars in our community. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may purchase a gift card or make a donation of any amount. Thank you!
Sunday, January
24, 2021
FREE Random Acts of Fringe: Flying Solo Workshop Performance
One of the most unique things about The Asheville Fringe Arts Festival is our Random Acts of Fringe. These short, site-specific performances are mostly free and open to the public. This year, most of our RAFs are happening on social media, so be sure to follow us there for more information about these shows.
Thursday, January
28, 2021
City Dance
Beginner’s workshop lesson at 7:30 P.M., then 8-11 P.M. Contra Dance with Country Waltzing at the break and the final dance. This is a partner dance but it’s not necessary to come with a partner. We have different live bands and callers.
Thursday, February
4, 2021
An Evening with Anna Deavere Smith
We live in a winner-take-all society. And yet, part of our potential as humans is our potential for compassion and our resilience in the face of adversity. While doing research for her play Let Me Down Easy, award-winning playwright/actor/educator Anna Deavere Smith interviewed people in the U.S. and abroad who demonstrated grace in the face of dramatic challenges. This storytelling speech celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, the power of empathy, the strength of imagination, and hope.
**The film adaption of Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles is available to view as a complimentary companion piece to Smith’s appearance with the performing arts series.
Wednesday, February
24, 2021
UNCA Visiting Writers Series Claudia Rankine
Each year, the Department of English brings visiting writers across genres for readings and master classes with students, hosted by our Writer-in-Residence, Wiley Cash. In recent years, the department has hosted several award-winning writers, including Ben Fountain, Camille Dungy, David Ebershoff, Chrystal Hana Kim, Frank X Walker, and many others.
Acclaimed poet, essayist and Guggenheim Fellow, Claudia Rankine, will present a reading and talk via zoom on Wednesday, February 24th at 7:00 PM. One of the most prominent voices in literary and critical race studies, Rankine is the author of Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), and six collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March of 2020 at The Shed, NYC, The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/American Repertory Theater) and published by Graywolf Press in 2019, and Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (FENCE, 2015). In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).
Thursday, February
25, 2021
City Dance
BalletX
Beginner’s workshop lesson at 7:30 P.M., then 8-11 P.M. Contra Dance with Country Waltzing at the break and the final dance. This is a partner dance but it’s not necessary to come with a partner. We have different live bands and callers.
The special Schaefer Center Presents production will include a recorded introduction by BalletX co-founder Christine Cox, the BalletX 15th Anniversary Season video, and mixed rep selections “Increasing” and “Fancy Me.” In honor of BalletX’s 15th Anniversary Season, the company has commissioned a documentary film by Daniel Madoff that highlights its growth, trajectory, and continued commitment to redefining ballet in the 21st century. Known as Philadelphia’s premier contemporary ballet company, BalletX commissions choreographers from around the world to create new ballets that are “fresh, inclusive, and connect to what people want” (Philadelphia Citizen). Led by Artistic & Executive Director Christine Cox, BalletX has produced nearly 100 world premiere ballets by more than 50 choreographers, and performed for over 100,000 audience members at home and on tour, including appearances at such prestigious venues as the Kennedy Center, Vail Dance Festival, Joyce Theater, and Jacob’s Pillow.
Thursday, March
11, 2021
Steep Canyon Rangers
The Grammy winners from Asheville, NC come to Boone for a live concert streamed from the stage of the Schaefer Center into your homes. Frequent collaborators with banjoist (and comedian) Steve Martin, Steep Canyon Rangers are major players in the bluegrass/country and Americana scene today, with comparisons to The Band, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Zac Brown Band. SCR released three albums in 2020, including North Carolina Songbook, a recording of their 2019 performance at Merlefest in Wilkesboro, NC, in which they performed a selection of songs by NC songwriters such as Ola Belle Reed, Doc Watson, James Taylor, and Ben E. King; Be Still Moses, which has the band teaming up with Philly soul legends Boyz II Men and their hometown Asheville Symphony to perform reimagined versions of previously released SCR songs; and their most recent release of all original music, Arm in Arm. “Every song on Arm in Arm captures the North Carolina group’s innovative spirit, weaving in jazz, gospel, folk, and even rock phrases, creating an intimate and intricate sound that challenges, cajoles, and comforts.” (No Depression)
Friday, March
12, 2021
Creative Writing Group online
Come join us for creative writing online! We’ll meet on Zoom and do several rounds of writing and reading our writing to each other. Our focus is creating a supportive and fun environment through writing exercises and discussion
Tuesday, March
16, 2021
UNCA Visiting Writers Series: CJ Hauser
Visiting Writers Series
CJ Hauser teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University. Her novel, Family of Origin, was published by Doubleday in 2019. She is also the author of the novel The From-Aways, and her fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, and The Kenyon Review.
This event is free and open to the public, but you must register at this link:
Thursday, March
25, 2021
City Dance
Beginner’s workshop lesson at 7:30 P.M., then 8-11 P.M. Contra Dance with Country Waltzing at the break and the final dance. This is a partner dance but it’s not necessary to come with a partner. We have different live bands and callers.
Thursday, April
1, 2021
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
Live Stream Reader Meet Writer: Wild Women and the Blues with Denny S. Bryce
April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
We’re pleased to be part of the Reader Meet Writer series of online events hosted by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.
This event is free but registration is required. Prior to the event we will send an email with the link required to complete your registration and attend on Zoom.
In a stirring and impeccably researched novel of Jazz-Age Chicago in all its vibrant life, two stories intertwine nearly a hundred years apart, as a chorus girl and a film student deal with loss, forgiveness, and love…in all its joy, sadness, and imperfections.
“Why would I talk to you about my life? I don’t know you, and even if I did, I don’t tell my story to just any boy with long hair, who probably smokes weed.You wanna hear about me. You gotta tell me something about you. To make this worth my while.”
1925: Chicago is the jazz capital of the world, and the Dreamland Café is the ritziest black-and-tan club in town. Honoree Dalcour is a sharecropper’s daughter, willing to work hard and dance every night on her way to the top. Dreamland offers a path to the good life, socializing with celebrities like Louis Armstrong and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But Chicago is also awash in bootleg whiskey, gambling, and gangsters. And a young woman driven by ambition might risk more than she can stand to lose.
2015: Film student Sawyer Hayes arrives at the bedside of 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour, still reeling from a devastating loss that has taken him right to the brink. Sawyer has rested all his hope on this frail but formidable woman, the only living link to the legendary Oscar Micheaux. If he’s right—if she can fill in the blanks in his research, perhaps he can complete his thesis and begin a new chapter in his life. But the links Honoree makes are not ones he’s expecting…
Piece by piece, Honoree reveals her past and her secrets, while Sawyer fights tooth and nail to keep his. It’s a story of courage and ambition, hot jazz and illicit passions. And as past meets present, for Honoree, it’s a final chance to be truly heard and seen before it’s too late. No matter the cost…
DENNY S. BRYCE is an award-winning author and three-time RWA Golden Heart® finalist, including twice for Wild Women and the Blues. In addition to writing for NPR Books and FROLIC Media, the former professional dancer is a public relations professional who has spent over two decades running her own marketing and event management firm. A member of the Historical Novel Society, Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and Novelists, Inc., she is a frequent speaker at author events. Originally from Chicago, she now lives in Savannah, Georgia. Visit her online at DennySBryce.com.
Friday, April
2, 2021
Voices of the River: Art + Poetry Contest
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
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April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
Saturday, April
3, 2021
Voices of the River: Art + Poetry Contest
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
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April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
Sunday, April
4, 2021
Voices of the River: Art + Poetry Contest
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
Poetrio: Petra Kuppers, Rodney Terich Leonard, and Kevin Prufer
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April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets. This month, we welcome Petra Kuppers, Rodney Terich Leonard, and Kevin Prufer. On the day of the event, we will send a reminder email with the link required to attend.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to 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!
PETRA KUPPERS is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her third poetry book, the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020), was named one of the top ten poetry collections of 2020 by the New York Public Library. She is also the author of the queer/crip speculative short story collection Ice Bar (2018). She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective; teaches at the University of Michigan and at Goddard College; and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. https://petrakuppersfiction.wordpress.com/
“Gut Botany charts my body / language living on indigenous land as a white settler and traveler,” Petra Kuppers writes in the notes of her new poetry collection. Using a perfect cocktail of surrealist and situationist techniques, Kuppers submits to the work and to the land, moving through ancient fish, wounded bodies, and the space around her. The book invites the reader to navigate their own body through the peaks and pitfalls of pain, survival, sensual joy, and healing. Readers looking for experimental poetry that takes up space in their brains and bodies will dive deep and fast into this queer ecosomatic investigation.
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RODNEY TERICH LEONARD was born in Nixburg, Alabama. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Indolent Books-What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. Sweetgum & Lightning is his debut collection of poetry. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.
Sweetgum & Lightning lets us into an extraordinary poetic universe, shaped by a vernacular rooted in the language of self, one’s origins, and music. In poems that are deeply sensual in nature, Rodney Terich Leonard considers gender and sexuality, art, poverty, and community. Imagery expands through unexpected lexical associations and rumination on the function of language; words take on new meaning and specificity, and the music of language becomes tantamount to the denotations of words themselves. Through extensive webs of connotation, Leonard’s narratives achieve a sense of accuracy and intimacy. The nuanced lens of these poems is indicative of the honesty of expression at work in the collection—one that affirms the essentiality of perception to living and memory.
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KEVIN PRUFER was born in Cleveland, OH, and attended Wesleyan University, The Hollins Writing Program, and Washington University. He is the author of eight poetry collections, including the Four Way Books titles The Art of Fiction (2021); How He Loved Them (2018), long-listed for the Pulitzer, named a finalist for the Rilke Prize, and winner of the Julie Suk Award; Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by The New York Times Book Review; In a Beautiful Country (2011), a Rilke Prize and Poets’ Prize finalist; and National Anthem (2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly and a finalist for the Poets’ Prize. Prufer is the recipient of many awards, including four Pushcart prizes, several awards from the Poetry Society of America (including the 2018 Lyric Prize), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, and several Best American Poetry selections. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
The Art of Fiction is Prufer’s eighth collection of poetry (and fifth with Four Way Books). Prufer’s career-spanning talent for estranging the familiar—and also for recording the unthinkable with eerie directness—recurs, enhanced and transformed by the collection’s meta-level attention to the role of fiction in our civic lives. Prufer describes, often through personae, a near future, tracing there the political gambit of Fake News and the role of the imagination in our self-understanding (whether it’s cogent or delusional). Via both satire and direct address (to the point of reader-squeamishness), Prufer aims to understand the ugly-casual atmosphere of our often racialized, pervasive distrust. The Art of Fiction fundamentally understands that fictions are deployed to divide us, and they work: they get under our skin. Prufer powerfully explores the roles of imagination and art in how we explain ourselves to ourselves.
Monday, April
5, 2021
Voices of the River: Art + Poetry Contest
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
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April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
Tuesday, April
6, 2021
Voices of the River: Art + Poetry Contest
Celebrate National Poetry Month at the Library Black Out Poetry Kits
Celebrate National Poetry Month: Dark City Poets Society
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April is National Poetry Month and we invite all poets, would be poets and poetry fans to celebrate with Buncombe County Public Libraries. We’ll be hosting the following free events at libraries all over the county. For more information on any of these programs, contact your friendly neighborhood library.
Black Out Poetry Kits Available at the Library
All Month Long
Every Library
Come to any library and pick up a free kit to create a black out poetry masterpiece. Black out poetry doesn’t start with a blank page, it starts with a page of words taken from an old book. Poets will eliminate words to create a poem composed of the words left on the page. Visit any branch of Buncombe County Public Libraries in April to pick up your very own black out poetry kit featuring markers, inspiration and pages of print to begin your creation. When you’re finished, photograph your creation and upload it to facebook or instagram. Tag your library’s account and we’ll feature it as a post! You can also drop your poem by the library and we’ll post it for you. Kits are available while supplies last.
Join our supportive circle of poets. Whether you want to share a favorite work by a poet, get critiques of your own work, or cheer one another on, this is the group for you! This is a socially-distanced in-person meeting on the library’s back lawn. Attendees will need to register and follow all safety protocols.
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Join our supportive circle of poets. Whether you want to share a favorite work by a poet, get critiques of your own work, or cheer one another on, this is the group for you! **This is a socially-distanced in-person meeting on the library’s back lawn. Attendees MUST complete a waiver and abide by safety protocols: Registration Social Distancing Measures Thank you for your cooperation! |