Writers at Home is a monthly series featuring work from UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program and The Great Smokies Review. April’s event will feature Mildred Barya launching her newest poetry collection The Animals of My Earth School in conversation with Tina Barr.

This event is in-person only. Registration is required, and there is a limited number of seats available to attend the event. There is no virtual attendance option.

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

If you’re unable to attend this event, you can still get a signed copy of The Animals of My Earth School by pre-ordering from Malaprop’s below. For personalization, use the order comments field to tell us to whom the books should be signed, e.g. “To Martha.”

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!

Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer from Uganda and the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently The Animals of My Earth School released by Terrapin Books, 2023. Her prose, hybrids, and poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She’s now working on a collection of creative nonfiction, and her essay, “Being Here in This Body”, won the 2020 Linda Flowers Literary Award and was published in the North Carolina Literary Review. Barya teaches creative writing and literature at UNC-Asheville, serves on the boards of African Writers Trust and Story Parlor, and coordinates the Poetrio Reading events at Malaprop’s Independent Bookstore/Café. She blogs here www.mildredbarya.com.

Tina Barr’s most recent book, Green Target, won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Brockman-Campbell Award. Previous books include The Gathering Eye, winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Award, and Kaleidoscope. She’s received fellowships from the NEA, The Tennessee Arts Commission, & the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her poems have been published in The Harvard Review, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Journal of Poetry, Crosswinds, Brilliant Corners, Barrow Street, North American Review, Mudfish, Tar River Poetry, Poetry South, and elsewhere. She blogs here https://tinabarr.com.

Praise for the book
In The Animals of My Earth School, Mildred Kiconco Barya gives us magnificent hungers and provocative feasts. Her poems tutor us via insects, mammals, birds, and reptiles in the slippages of time and place and the swerves between “dreaming and becoming” that inform our interwoven habits and habitats. With language and structures that are “sinewed with complexity,” her poems swing between singing and saying, between “praying and preying.” Barya’s spirited, multi- species collection asks questions no answers can satiate. But we are assured that “when we arrive at our door, teeth on edge,/ we taste beyond question what we have become.”
—Laura-Gray Street, poet & The Ecopoetry Anthology (co-editor)

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.

This event includes a book signing. If you would like a signed book but can’t attend in person, use the order comments field when you order below to request a signed copy and tell us to whom the book should be personalized.

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!

About Indigo Field

In the rural South, a retired colonel in an upscale retirement community grieves the sudden death of his wife on the tennis court. On the other side of the highway, an elderly Black woman grieves the murder of her niece by a white man. Between them lies an abandoned field where three centuries of crimes are hidden, and only she knows the explosive secrets buried there. When the colonel runs into her car, causing a surprising amount of damage, it sparks a feud that sets loose the spirits in the Field, both benevolent and vengeful. In prose that been called “dazzling” and “mesmerizing,” in the animated voices of trees and birds and people, Southern-voiced storytelling as deeply layered as that of Pat Conroy, Marjorie Hudson lays out the boundaries of a field that contains the soul of the South, and leads us to a day of reckoning.

Originally from Washington, D.C., Marjorie Hudson has served as features editor of National Parks Magazine and written for Garden & Gun, American Land Forum, Wildlife in North Carolina, Our State Magazine, and North Carolina Literary Review. She worked as copyediting chief for Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her short story collection, Accidental Birds of the Carolinas, first introduced Ambler County and some of the characters in Indigo Field. She lives with her husband, Sam, and feisty small terrier DJ, on a century farm in North Carolina, where she mentors writers and reads poetry to trees.

Andrew Lawler is author of three books, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, a national bestseller, and Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization.  As a journalist, he has written more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles from more than two dozen countries. His byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and many others. He is contributing writer for Science and contributing editor for Archaeology. Andrew’s work has appeared several times in The Best of Science and Nature Writing.

EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 6:30 pm ~ FREE!

AGES 18+ ADULTS ONLY ~ NO KIDS ALLOWED

ON OUR HUGE SCREEN IN THEATER 2!

ENJOY DINNER & DRINKS (FULL BAR) WHILE PLAYING

There are 3 rounds with new winners each round so you can show up late, miss a round and still be a winner. Plus, we have mid-round prizes to create as many winners as possible.

The questions are presented by a hilarious host on our giant movie screen and includes fun videos in each round.  You haven’t played a trivia night like this one!

Beat the mid week grind with some fun trivia! Win a $25 gift card for our taproom along with a $25 gift card from our resident kitchen, Bears Smokehouse BBQ!

Every Wednesday Trivia Night

Please join us at The 2nd Act in Hendersonville, NC for our first monthly book club meeting that strives to read books that create a closer knit and more inclusive community! We will meet virtually and in person monthly to discuss a book, so read the book and then join in the discussion in person or online every third Thursday. All are welcome! At the end of each meeting we will vote on the next book! The virtual club meeting will be in Zoom format and will meet 2.5 hours after the in-person meeting (8:00pm EST). After the meeting there is live acoustic music so stay and enjoy the vibe with your new friends! Put us down on your calendar for every third Third Thursday!

The first book is going to be called Disability Visibility.

Synopsis from the back cover: One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent—but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love. Preview:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51456746-disability-visibility
Message me for the Zoom link to the online meetup. Thanks!

Trivia, Singo, tailgate games, and more! Our games are sure to challenge you, but c’mon… it’s not rocket science!

This month’s short story, voted on during our last meeting, is from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Strout. The story is ‘Snow Blind,’ which won the the 2015 O’Henry Prize for short fiction.

A copy of the story can be found here:

https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/snow-blind

Join New York Times Bestselling author and UNC Asheville alumnus, Wiley Cash ’00 in conversation with author Benjamin Gilmer on Thursday, April 20 at 7 p.m. at UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center in the Manheimer Room.

This event is part of the Common Word Community Read, curated by Cash. The program brings the UNC Asheville community together to engage in a collective educational experience. Each semester, one book will serve as the focus of numerous virtual and in-person lectures and discussions that will allow participants to delve deeper into the text. Over the course of the academic year, participants will read one book each semester, gaining insights and sharing ideas in a welcoming and respectful environment. Spring 2023’s selection is The Other Dr. Gilmer: Two Men, a Murder, and an Unlikely Fight for Justice.

Notorious HBC (History Book Club)

Science Fiction Book Club

Join host and former 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 7pm on Zoom. Also meets the second Monday of every month at 7pm to discuss the film adaptations of the books we read. To learn more or join the club, email [email protected].

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.

Click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link to attend will be emailed to attendees on the day of the event.

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

This event includes a book signing. If you would like a signed book but can’t attend in person, use the order comments field when you order below to request a signed copy and tell us to whom the book should be personalized.

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 classic memoir that explores the Nazi presence in the south of Chile after the war, Marjorie Agoisin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, who grew up as the daughter of European Jewish immigrants in Chile in the World War II era. Woven into the narrative are the stories of Frida’s father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who arrived in Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great-grandmother from Odessa, who loved the Spanish language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Agosin’s A Cross and a Star is a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and words. This edition includes a collection of important new photographs, a new afterword by the author, and a foreword by Ruth Behar.

Marjorie Agosín is the Pura Belpré Award–winning author of I Lived on Butterfly Hill and The Maps of Memory. Raised in Chile, her family moved to the United States to escape the horrors of the Pinochet takeover of their country. She has received the Letras de Oro Prize for her poetry, and her writings about—and humanitarian work for—women in Chile have been the focus of feature articles in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Ms. magazine. She has also won the Latino Literature Prize for her poetry. She is a Spanish professor at Wellesley College.

Emöke B’Rácz is the beloved founder and co-owner of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe and Downtown Books & News. She is the editor of Hungarian Refugee (Burning Bush Press of Asheville, 2021) an account of life and revolution in Hungary taken from writings by and interviews with her father, Istvan B’Rácz. Also an accomplished artist and poet, she is the author of the poetry collection, Every Tree is the Forest.

Celeste Kostopulos Cooperman‘s translations of Latin American women’s poetry have appeared in numerous publications including Harper’s, Human Rights Quarterly, City Lights (San Francisco), and The Bitter Oeander (New York). She has also translated a number of books by Marjorie Agosín, including A Cross and a Star (University of New Mexico, 1995 & 2022). She received the Outstanding Translation Award from The American Literary Translations Association for Circles of Madness / Circulos de locura: Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo (New York: White Pine Press, 1992). She is also the author of the Lyrical Vision of María Luisa Bombal (London, Tamesis Press), At the Threshold of Memory / Selected and New Poems by Marjorie Agosín, and Secrets in the Sand, The Young Women of Juárez, also with White Pine, a translated volume of poems by Marjorie Agosín for which she wrote the critical introduction. Her most recent publication appears in Rio Bravo, A Journal of Borderlands, “Mujeres en la frontera.” Cooperman holds an M.A. (1976) and a Ph.D. (1980) in Hispanic Studies from Brown University.

EVERY WEDNESDAY AT 6:30 pm ~ FREE!

AGES 18+ ADULTS ONLY ~ NO KIDS ALLOWED

ON OUR HUGE SCREEN IN THEATER 2!

ENJOY DINNER & DRINKS (FULL BAR) WHILE PLAYING

There are 3 rounds with new winners each round so you can show up late, miss a round and still be a winner. Plus, we have mid-round prizes to create as many winners as possible.

The questions are presented by a hilarious host on our giant movie screen and includes fun videos in each round.  You haven’t played a trivia night like this one!

Beat the mid week grind with some fun trivia! Win a $25 gift card for our taproom along with a $25 gift card from our resident kitchen, Bears Smokehouse BBQ!

Foodie Book Club

Every Wednesday Trivia Night

Join host Keith Flynn to celebrate the publication of the 2022 Asheville Poetry Review and the winners of the William Matthews Poetry Prize.

1^st place — Maura High
2^nd place — Christina Hutchins
3^rd place — Anna Lena Phillips Bell

This event is virtual.  Attendance is free, but registration is required.  Please 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!

Maura High was born in Wales and now lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she works as a freelance copy editor. Her poems have appeared in various print and online literary magazines, such as New England Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Panoply, Passager, Rhino, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Phare. She is author of The Garden of Persuasions (Jacar Press) and collaborated with the artist Lyric Kinard on Stone, Water, Time. Another collaboration, a chapbook titled The Abandoned Field, with the printmaker Jean LeCluyse, is under way. Many of her poems draw on what she learned while working with The Nature Conservancy, especially with their prescribed burn crews in the Sandhills and coastal plain of the state. Her website is at http://maurahigh.com.

Christina Hutchins’ second book, Tender the Maker, won the May Swenson Award of Utah State University Press. Her first collection was The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers Press), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde/Publishers’ Triangle Award. A chapbook, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air, won the Robin Becker Prize for queer poetry. Poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, Women’s Review of Books and elsewhere. Awards include The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, National Poetry Review’s Annie Finch Prize, a fellowship to St. Petersburg, Russia, and a recent summer living in Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, NH, as the Dartmouth Poet in Residence. She currently teaches privately and has previously worked as a Congregational minister and a biochemist.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St Brigid Press. New writing appears or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, Electric Literature, and Evergreen Review. Bell’s work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Marble House Project. The winner of the 2021 Winter Anthology Contest, she teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington and is the editor of Ecotone. More at annalenaphillipsbell.net.

Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of eight books, including six collections of poetry: most recently Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013) and The Skin of Meaning (Red Hen Press, 2020), and two collections of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer’s Digest Books, 2007), and Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession (RedHawk Publications, 2021). From 1984-1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, Nervous Splendor (2003). His latest album is Keith Flynn & The Holy Men, LIVE at Diana Wortham Theatre (2011). He is the Executive Director and producer of the TV and radio show, “LIVE at White Rock Hall,” (www.liveatwhiterockhall.com) and Animal Sounds Productions, both which create collaborations between writers and musicians in video and audio formats. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, Five Points, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, ThePoetics of American Song Lyrics, Writer’s Chronicle. The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994.

Trivia, Singo, tailgate games, and more! Our games are sure to challenge you, but c’mon… it’s not rocket science!

Independence for us means locally-owned, human-curated, non-book-devaluing-data-mining-algorithm-driven-giant-corporation, community-minded, warm, friendly, smart and sassy, and downright FUN in the most bookish ways!

About Independent Bookstore Day

Independent Bookstore Day began in California in 2014 and became a national event the next year. A host of publishers and authors such as Neil Gaiman, George Saunders, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, James Patterson, Stephen King and many others have donated work in support of the event. Independent Bookstore Day (IBD) is produced by writer and former bookseller Samantha Schoech in partnership with the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Its sponsors include Penguin Random House, Ingram, and the American Bookseller’s Association. www.indiebookstoreday.com

Follow Independent Bookstore Day:

Facebook at Facebook.com/BookstoreDay

Twitter @BookstoreDay

Instagram @indiebookstoreday

#BookstoreDay

Drabble Forms & Author Talk with Arlene Hemingway

Want to write and don’t know where to begin? Nurture your intuition? Or just have some FUN writing? Drabble writing may be for you! Derived from Monty Python’s Big Red Book, the drabble form is a short work of fiction—a complete story—with precisely 100 words, no more, no less. Sound easy? Surprisingly, it’s not! But you will learn to distill the essence of a situation and convey it with power and concision. You will also learn how to create a great drabble, and take a crack at your first! I promise it will be an adventure and bring you both new skills and insight. Got an idea for a book? Something that you needed to talk to someone about? A problem to solve? Drabbling can be a path for getting you there!

She will also be sharing from her book, A Twist of Lemon: 100 Curious Stories in Exactly 100 Words.

About the Author:
After graduating with a Master of Science Degree from Juilliard School of Music with a major in organ, Arlene became a piano teacher and a vocal music teacher in a Long Island public school system, and served as organist for religious services of various faiths. She performed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at Radio City Music Hall, worked numerous other musical events in New York, and launched a composer’s new work at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Following her professional retirement from music, Arlene concentrated on other healing arts: She is a certified hypnotherapist and Reiki Master, and holds additional certifications in Regenesis (a method of reprogramming DNA) along with other techniques. During a visit to a writer’s group in Farmingdale, NY, Arlene discovered the “drabble,” a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length. She was hooked! A recent move to the Asheville, North Carolina area gave her more room to breathe, listen, and write.

When asked about a relationship to Ernest Hemingway, her reply is often, “I’m the other Hemingway; the one without the six-toed cats.” Arlene has discovered that every person, place, or thing is rich with stories wanting to be told… and she has just scratched the surface.