Joan Frank and Peg Alford are two writers who’ve written to one another over years—beginning with physical letters and now through emails—in the course of which they talk about their writing lives. The authors will choose a section from one another’s books to read.

Click here to RSVP for this event. Prior to the event, we will email you 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!

The Outlook for Earthlings traces an unusual, difficult friendship across a lifetime, between women of stunningly opposite natures. Melanie Taper is timid, compelled to obey and venerate authority. Yet in unguarded moments she demonstrates such deadly insight into human foibles as to suggest a strength that has, for dark reasons, deliberately hidden itself. Scarlet Rand, by contrast, is rash, willful, and impatient of reverence of any stripe. Scarlet is shocked by Mel’s passive reserve; despite her obvious gifts, Mel is–bafflingly–self-erasing. Mel’s saintliness maddens Scarlet–because finally and most troublingly, Scarlet disbelieves it. Their friendship suggests to each a final frontier, a saving sanctuary. Yet at its core, a pained impasse soon becomes evident: each woman takes a secret, moral offense at the other’s inmost nature–and choices. Living out these differences–against awareness of the illness which is slowly destroying one of them–proves an ultimate challenge. In each, a reckoning must occur. The Outlook for Earthlings examines what women want, amid conflicting layers of need. It ponders beginnings, endings, and Virginia Woolf’s declaration that good angels must be killed. It considers the limits of friendship–and of the act of witnessing. At its heart, it asks how we may finally measure a life–and who should do the measuring.

Joan Frank is the author of two essay collections and eight novels, including Miss Kansas City, which won the Michigan Literary Fiction Award.

Following her acclaimed debut, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, award-winning author Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables. A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers.In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell’s stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable.

A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where “no one can deter a person from her mistakes.”

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, a collection of hybrid with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Antonya Nelson, Glen David Gold, and others, and featured by Poets & Writers magazine’s second annual 5 over 50, December 2017. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and of WTAW Press. She lives in Northern California.

Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets! In February, we welcome Artress Bethany White, Kathleen O’Toole, and Alice Friman. Poet and Poetrio Coordinator Mildred K Barya will host.

Click here to RSVP. The link required to attend will be emailed on the day of the event.

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. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may also make a donation or purchase a gift card below. Thank you!

Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection, My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019). Her debut essay collection, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020), is currently listed as a Community of Literary Magazines and Presses ( CLMP ) social justice read. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Solstice, Poet Lore, Ecotone, Birmingham Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Hopkins Review.  New work is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review and Tahoma Review. White has received fellowships and residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and the Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA studios. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. She is current nonfiction editor at the Boston-based literary magazine Pangyrus. http://www.artressbethanywhite.com

In verse, both free and deftly formal, Artress Bethany White unflinchingly mines the notion of family: biological, blended, constructed and decidedly American. She takes no prisoners, or perhaps takes us all prisoners, kicking into the necessary and discomfiting discourse of who we truly are—and how we are tied together in awful, and also surprisingly beautiful, ways.

Kathleen O’Toole has braided an active professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals including America, Atlanta Review, Christian Century, Cresset, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Presence and smartish Pace. Her latest collection This Far, was released by Paraclete Press in October 2019. Her other books include two chapbooks, Practice and Waking Hours, and a previous full-length collection, Meanwhile, as well as In the Margins, which she co-authored with three other women poets. Her poem “Sierra Lament” won the 2020 Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize. Kathleen is the current Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD. Find her work at https://kathleenotoolepoetry.com

This Far: Poems offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poet’s creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs—grief and the desire to honor those “saints” who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, “this far,” and gestures to what lies beyond.

Alice Friman’s seventh collection of poetry, Blood Weather, is from LSU press. She is a recipient of many honors including two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in Best American Poetry. She’s been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Plume, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Cloudbank, and many others. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she was Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. Her website is alicefrimanpoet.com

Blood Weather reminds readers that times of reckoning are marked by blood: the knife, the sword, the cutting word. Blood runs through our history, stories, religion, and art, and we cannot help but play our part by adding to the storm of “fang and claw” and its inherent sorrow. Friman traces this unending path through biblical tales, the war of the sexes, the continuum of art, and her own family and personal life. Her poems reflect on figures ranging from Lady Macbeth—whom Friman sees in the blood-red tree outside her bedroom window—to Cain and Abel in the biblical account of the first murder, through Judge Judy’s frustrations when faced with the death of a marriage, to the poet herself as a child learning to read “the ancient writing of the butcher block / streaked with cuts and sacrifice” and the butcher’s hands, “blunt-fingered and stained.” By turns stark and resilient, the poems in Blood Weather draw on tragic themes and painful memories to evoke the

Join us for the launch of Roots, Branches & Spirits: The Folkways & Witchery of Appalachia. H. Byron Ballard will sign and personalize copies purchased from Malaprop’s!  Pre-order below and put your personalization request in the comment section during checkout (e.g. “to Jane”).

Like most of our events, this event is free, but registration is required. Click here to RSVP for this event. Prior to the event the link required to attend will be emailed to registrants.

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. 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!

The southern Appalachians are rich in folk magic and witchery. This book explores the region’s customs and traditions for magical healing, luck, prosperity, and more. Author Byron Ballard–known as the village witch of Asheville, North Carolina–teaches you about the old ways and why they work, from dowsing to communicating with spirits.

Learn the deeper meaning of magic hands for finding, haint blue doors, and herbs and plants for healing. Discover hands-on tips for creating tinctures and salves, attuning to the phases of the moon, interpreting omens, and other folkways passed down through generations of those who call the Blue Ridge Mountains home. Part cultural journey and part magical guide, this book uncovers the authentic traditions of one of North America’s most spiritually vibrant regions.

Byron Ballard MFA (Asheville, NC) is a teacher, folklorist, and writer who was born and raised in western North Carolina. She has served as a featured presenter at Sacred Space Conference, Southeast Wise Women’s Herbal Conference, Glastonbury Goddess Conference, and other gatherings and has spoken at conferences at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Ballard is senior priestess and cofounder of Mother Grove Goddess Temple and the Coalition of Earth Religions/CERES. She writes a regular column for SageWoman Magazine and is the author of four previous books, including Staubs and Ditchwater.

Join Malaprop’s own Children’s Buyer and Bookseller Amy Cherrix and Allan Wolf for this exciting virtual book launch. In the Shadow of the Moon: America, Russia, and the Hidden History of the Space Race tells the extraordinary story of the space race and the bitter rivalry that launched humankind to the moon! Signed/personalized copies of both author’s books are available, please request via the comments section during checkout. 

Click here to RSVP for this event. Prior to the event, we will email you 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. 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!

An exhilarating dive into the secret history of humankind’s race to the moon, from acclaimed author Amy Cherrix. This fascinating and immersive read is perfect for fans of Steve Sheinkin’s Bomb and M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for the City of the Dead. You’ve heard of the space race, but do you know the whole story? The most ambitious race humankind has ever undertaken was masterminded in the shadows by two engineers on opposite sides of the Cold War–Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi officer living in the US, and Sergei Korolev, a Russian rocket designer once jailed for crimes against his country–and your textbooks probably never told you. Von Braun became an American hero, recognized the world over, while Korolev toiled in obscurity. These two brilliant rocketeers never met, but together they shaped the science of spaceflight and redefined modern warfare. From Stalin’s brutal Gulag prisons and Hitler’s concentration camps to Cape Canaveral and beyond, their simultaneous quests pushed science–and human ingenuity–to the breaking point.
Amy Cherrix is the author of the middle grade nonfiction books Backyard Bears: Conservation, Habitat Changes, and the Rise of Urban Wildlife and Eye of the Storm: NASA, Drones, and the Race to Crack the Hurricane Code, a Subaru Prize for Excellence in middle grade science book finalist. In her nonwriting life, Amy is the children’s book buyer at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. This is her first book for teens. You can find her online at www.amycherrix.com.

Allan Wolf is an acclaimed poet and storyteller. Along with his two other historical verse novels, The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic and New Found Land: Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery, he is the author of The Blood-Hungry Spleen and Other Poems About Our Parts and the young adult novels Who Killed Christopher Goodman? and Zane’s Trace. Allan Wolf lives in Asheville, North Carolina.