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.

Thursday, July 14, 2022
Webinar Deep Dive Lab – Branding Your Business
Jul 14 @ 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Webinar

Deep Dive Lab - Branding Your Business

Attendees will learn how to build trust with their customers and understand how to best leverage social media for their business brands. It is recommended that attendees have a website (or plan for a website) and at least one active social media account for their business

Friday, August 5, 2022
Light Up the Night 5k
Aug 5 @ 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Carrier Park

Western Carolina Rescue Ministries and iDaph Events present the 4th Annual Light Up the Night 5k! This event is a fundraising, nighttime walk/run event that welcomes all people regardless of ability, race, color, ethnicity, gender, or faith. All the proceeds from this event will directly benefit the continuous work of recovery, rescue, and restoration to individuals throughout WNC.

The first 200 people to register will also receive a FREE glow-in-the-dark commemorative finisher medal!

Each 5k registration will include a FREE t-shirt until July 10th at midnight. After that date, shirts will be available for purchase, in limited quantities and sizes, for $10. Glow sticks, necklaces and bracelets will be available for our in-person participants!

The event will take place at Carrier Park in Asheville, NC on Friday, August 5th. This is your time to shine! Runners will have a rolling start between 7:30 PM to 7:45 PM and take to the greenway to run or walk this fun and unique event.

In addition to the in-person event, there is also a virtual offering for participants who aren’t comfortable coming to an in-person event. The Virtual 5k event experience gives participants an opportunity to participate in this fundraising event ANYWHERE! Walk/Run/Hike 5k and submit your results online!

Western Carolina Rescue Ministries (WCRM) exists to serve the homeless, poor and addicted populations of Western North Carolina. They meet people in crisis, focus on helping them at the point of their need, invest in their future, and help them until they can move forward.

Thursday, August 18, 2022
THE MOTH Presents: Asheville StorySLAM – “Happy”
Aug 18 @ 7:30 pm
The Grey Eagle

– FULLY SEATED SHOW

THE MOTH resumes their recurring monthly Asheville StorySLAM at The Grey Eagle on the third Thursday of each month through December at 7:30pm! This month’s theme is….

HAPPY: Prepare a five-minute story about smiles and sunshine. Think unbridled joy—landing the dream job, winning the talent show, or bowling a perfect game. The quest for your soul mate or for the perfect cup of coffee. The Midas touch. The good old days. Tales of finding happiness or letting it slip through your fingers.

Thursday, September 15, 2022
THE MOTH Presents: Asheville StorySLAM – “Juggle”
Sep 15 @ 7:30 pm
The Grey Eagle

Saturday, October 8, 2022
Roundtable Sessions for Women Entrepreneurs
Oct 8 @ 10:00 am
Downtown Asheville NC

Join us in this inclusive and supportive environment as we all take turns in the “hot seat” where the focus is on getting insight and solving problems.

This is really a great chance to level-up your business or figure out how to implement your dream. And it’s an opportunity to meet some new business besties.
Tickets and more information available at https://www.plrconnectevents.com/roundtable-sessions

Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Job Fair
Oct 12 @ 5:00 pm
Irene Wortham Center

Find a career where you make a difference! Hiring for more than 25 positions, $15/hr minimum wage, $500 signing bonus, full time and part time available. No experience required!

Thursday, October 20, 2022
Poetry Reading: Jeffery Beam
Oct 20 @ 7:00 pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing.

At the age of 42, queer poet Jeffery Beam fell in love with a younger man, threatening his then 15-year relationship. These poems were born of that spiritual alchemical blaze, and its substantial healing power. The poet-lover’s sacred quest through heartbreak, suffering, grief, and regret, progresses ultimately to a joyful ecstatic reunion with the Beloved Divine. A mini-essay, “Don’t Forget Love: Sacred Longing’s Dark Project”, further illuminates the actual, mythological, and spiritual origins of the poems, and describes the poet’s lifetime search through experience, teachings, and literature, to a condition in which Desire and Love enrich instead of subsume the Self.

What could be more important than a love poem? These by Jeffery Beam are gorgeous, rich, and wise. I’m reminded how the thinnest membrane separates rapture from heartbreak, how both the human realm and the insect kingdom are awash with love. Beam’s poems flicker between Mirabai and the evening cricket, between Rilke and the night-clad firefly. Look close. Look close again!

-Andrew Schelling, author of Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Spiritual and Erotic Longing

Jeffery Beam’s work hailed for its “transcendent, lush beauty, its minimal sacrament, simplicity and physicality” fuses through Gnostic intention the physical and spiritual worlds, creating a conversation between the natural world, the body, and the spirit.
Sunday, November 6, 2022
Hybrid | Poetrio: Sarah Cooper, Barbara Costas-Biggs, AE Hines
Nov 6 @ 4:30 pm
Malaprop's Bookstore and Virtual

Image contains the text: Hybrid. POETRIO: Sarah Cooper, Barbara Costas-Biggs, AE Hines Sunday November 6, 2022 at 4:30pm ET. Next to the text are photos of the participants and the covers of their books 89%, BROKEN ON THE WHEEL, and ANY DUMB ANIMAL

Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and coordinated by Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Sarah Cooper, Barbara Costas-Biggs, and AE Hines. 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. 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.

This event includes a book signing. If you are not attending in person but would like a signed book you may request one using the comments field when you order online or by call the store at 828-254-6734 during store hours.

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! Feel free to email [email protected] with questions. We look forward to seeing you, whether in-person or online!


 

Sarah Cooper is the author of two poetry collections: Permanent Marker (Paper Nautilus, 2020) and most recently, 89% (Clemson University Press 2022).  Her poems also appear in Lunch, Sinister Wisdom, Iron Horse and other anthologies and literary journals.  Currently, Sarah is a PhD candidate in Rhetorics, Communication and Informational Design at Clemson University. Her dissertation project explores how spatial practices intersect with lesbian identity. She is a professor of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies at Clemson University where she received the Holman Award for teaching, was a 2021 LGBTQ+ Faculty Excellence Award winner, a 2022 Gentry Award winner for teaching excellence and the 2022 Tee A. Corrine Fellow at the University of Oregon. For more, visit https://www.sarahcooperpoet.com/poetry

Sometimes, a poem can show us a map of the human heart and all its pumping valves, all the blood it welcomes and lets go. In 89%, Sarah Cooper gives us that map from all angles-the love and loss of a mother, the loss and love of self, the way romantic love can scare us into silence. In this stunning debut collection, Cooper splays open these moments of tenderness with precision and skill. This book is both the carving knife and the soothing balm. These poems have an unflinching eye-they see all the way through us and then swaddle us in whole, critical heartbeat of truth. 89% won the poetry prize for the Clemson-Converse Literature Series.

Barbara Costas-Biggs is a poet and librarian from Southern Ohio. Her work has appeared in Appalachian Review, Northern Appalachian Review, The Pikeville Review, 8Poems, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Other Shore, was a finalist for the Washburn Prize from Harbor Review. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and an MLIS from Kent State University. For more, visit http://stilljournal.net/interview-barbara-costas-biggs.php

“Things can be idyllic and then ugly,” Barbara Costas-Biggs writes. “A basket of pears in ochre, then piss the same color.” In Broken On the Wheel, the familiar is made strange, as it is in dreams. The speaker of these poems is a mother, a griever, a “hope-against-hoper,” so it’s no wonder this collection is packed with epiphanies and memories and crapshoots—“That in-between stuff./ What we, I hope, are mostly made of.” Broken On the Wheel is a perceptive, masterful debut.

AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was also a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, American Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Tar River Poetry and elsewhere. Born and raised in rural North Carolina, AE resides in Charlotte and Medellín, Colombia. For more, visit https://www.aehines.net

Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021), AE Hines’s poetry collection, presents a memoir-in-verse as told by a gay man raised in the rural South who comes of age during the AIDS crisis. Flashing back and forth in time, a cast of recurring characters and circumstances are woven into a rich tale of survival and redemption, exploring one man’s life as a queer son, father, and husband, over a span of more than thirty years.

 

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Black Starseed: Immaculate Conception
Nov 15 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Asheville Community Theater

Inspired by nature and following the self-published released of How to Heal the Planet from Wherever You Are, Cortina Jenelle introduces Oshanna Church of Spiritual Activism, with Oshanna debuting as a dynamic experience rooted in ceremony and inviting nature as a co-facilitator through theater, art and spoken word. After each production, all ticket proceeds are donated to a mission partner who is doing work in service to Mother Earth while also furthering truth, healing and reconciliation across race, gender and class.

Black Starseed: Immaculate Conception is the second installment of the Black Starseed series, which goes back in time as a prelude to Black Starseed: Revolutionary Reimagination (2020) – a debut partnership between adé PROJECT and PechaKucha Asheville co-creating a storytelling experience in voice of Black women at the intersection of creativity x spirituality. In this prelude, the life story of Cortina Jenelle becomes a moving memoir and an embodiment of a shared story from the matriarchs of Black, indigenous descent in a world where femininity, Blackness, sovereignty and indigeneity were not just criminal, but a threat to society. Black Starseed: Immaculate Conception may appear to just tell the story of one, yet is actually one version of the same story that constantly loops through time. Do you know how purposeful, brilliant and divine you already are, Starseed? This is heart song of the black sheep generation + millennials, and those born torn between ancestral remembrance and playing the game of life to win. Join us in a gathering of art, theater, ceremony (with a bonus book signing post-show) and storytelling and leave reminded of how to heal the planet from wherever you are.

Ticket proceeds benefit cleanup of the French Broad River with our mission partner for this show, Asheville Greenworks.

Saturday, December 10, 2022
CELEBRATING EMILY DICKINSON on Her Birthday: A Benefit for Our Voice
Dec 10 @ 3:00 pm
St. Mary's Episcopal Church

We are grateful to offer a benefit event again this December, the first since 2019.

This year’s performance will feature Chautauqua performer Carol Kessler, as Emily Dickinson, and the Asheville Flute Choir lending their talents to benefit Our Voice.

In the spirit of inclusivity and equity, PAN HARMONIA offers donation-based, pay-as-you-can community concerts. All are welcome.

Our VOICE serves all individuals in Buncombe County affected by sexual assault and abuse, through counseling, advocacy and education. https://www.ourvoicenc.org/

Advanced reservations are encouraged, as seating is limited. Those planning to attend are expected to be fully vaccinated for the safety of our community.
Email [email protected] or call the office at (828) 254-7123, if you have questions.
panharmonia.org

Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Punch Bucket Lit – A West Asheville Reading Series
Dec 13 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
Cellarest Beer Project

Punch Bucket Lit, West Asheville’s reading series at Cellarest Beer Project is back for more live readings in our taproom featuring authors Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn and Emily Paige Wilson. While the authors vary month-to-month you can always count on inspiring poetry, moving essays and heartfelt original literary works read aloud in the contemplative company of other lit nerds and creative types alike. We’ll booze, we’ll listen, we’ll feel feelings and we’ll see the world through a different lens for an evening.

Thursday, December 15, 2022
THE MOTH Presents: Asheville StorySLAM – “Anniversary”
Dec 15 @ 7:30 pm
The Grey Eagle

– FULLY SEATED SHOW

Performance Image

THE MOTH resumes their recurring monthly Asheville StorySLAM at The Grey Eagle on the third Thursday of each month through December at 7:30pm! This month’s theme is….

ANNIVERSARY: Prepare a five-minute story about milestones. Enduring love or loss. The fondness of nostalgia and the lessons of growth. Seconds, minutes, hours, or when time stood still. Paper or silver…extra points if you make it to platinum. Rejoice or reflect on the past while plotting the course ahead. Cheers to many more years!

Thursday, December 22, 2022
Poetry Open Mic
Dec 22 @ 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm
Shakedown Kava Lounge, Hendersonville

Poetry Open Mic Hendo is the all-new sister event of Poetry Open Mic Asheville, the longest-running open mic in Western North Carolina, this weekly event welcomes all people and all forms of creative expression at Hendersonville’s only Kava lounge.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Expand Your Circle: Speed connecting for women entrepreneurs
Jan 17 @ 5:30 pm
Downtown Asheville NC

When women entrepreneurs come together, more knowledge is shared, doors opened, and power multiplied. So come connect with other like-minded, forward thinking, go-getting women at Expand Your Circle.

Traditional networking events can be aaawwwwkward! But we have fun activities that make it easier to connect with other women entrepreneurs.
Connecting is important and here’s why:
* First, having support and community in your business leads to higher success rates.
* When women entrepreneurs come together, more knowledge is shared, doors opened, and power multiplied.
* Having a business bestie to ask “How did you handle that situation?” Or being able to share a win in your business is the best.
* Finally, It’s just way more fun to be connected with other like-minded, forward thinking, go-getting women!

Tickets are $13 and include one drink. The venue will be emailed to you after ticket purchase (yes, very cloak and dagger)