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.
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Ryan Fogarty
We are excited about inviting local and regional actors to come and try out for roles in our simulation events and the production of a series of mini movies called Stories. Our mission at the REAL Academy is to equip social workers with the tools and confidence to make good decisions in child welfare cases. We have seen the benefits of simulation training for social workers and the best way to provide that is using skilled actors to play realistic roles that challenge students before they practice in the community. This is a great opportunity for theatre students and professional actors alike because they will be paid for their work and also contribute to communities across North Carolina.
Gather your troop, pack your camping equipment and head out to Chimney Rock State Park for our annual Spring Boy Scout Day. Join us to explore new places, meet new friends and spend the night under the stars during this special event.
Click here for detailed program information. Registration closes April 23 and is limited to 150 scouts. So reserve your spot below! $30 reservation fee is non-refundable but will be applied to your final total amount.

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Ryan Fogarty
We are excited about inviting local and regional actors to come and try out for roles in our simulation events and the production of a series of mini movies called Stories. Our mission at the REAL Academy is to equip social workers with the tools and confidence to make good decisions in child welfare cases. We have seen the benefits of simulation training for social workers and the best way to provide that is using skilled actors to play realistic roles that challenge students before they practice in the community. This is a great opportunity for theatre students and professional actors alike because they will be paid for their work and also contribute to communities across North Carolina.
Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets. This month, we welcome Fleda Brown, Rita Quillen, and Gretchen Primack. Click here to RSVP for this event. 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!
Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series, 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir, Mortality, with Friends will be out from Wayne State University Press Fall 2021. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. Read more at: https://www.fledabrown.com
Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation. Brown’s poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to life’s terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.
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Rita Quillen’s poetry book, Some Notes You Hold was published by Madville in 2020. She’s also author of the novel Wayland, Iris Press (2019), a full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, Texas Review Press, (2016), and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel Hiding Ezra, released by Little Creek Books, was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she received three Pushcart nominations and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. She lives, farms, writes songs, and takes photographs at Early Autumn Farm in southwestern Virginia. Read more at www.ritasimsquillen.com.
Some Notes You Hold is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “golden years” are so named because of the high admission price—the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough. The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief. The middle section is a musical interlude, exploring the tremendous power of music to heal us mentally, physically, and spiritually and to reorder our thinking and our emotions. The last section, “Holding On,” explores the roads leading to survival: prayer and meditation, communion with the natural world, and writing.
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Gretchen Primack is the author of Kind, republished by Lantern Books in 2021; Visiting Days (Willow Books Editors Select Series); and Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple Press). She also co-wrote, with Jenny Brown, the memoir The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and other journals and anthologies. Primack has administrated and taught with college programs and poetry workshops in prison for many years, and she moonlights at The Golden Notebook Bookstore in Woodstock, NY. Read more at http://www.gretchenprimack.com/bio.php
Kind is the kind of poetry book that makes you think differently about our world and the beings that inhabit it. Primack explores all facets of our lives with other beings—the beauty, the tragedy, and the absurdity that surrounds her existence. Kind cuts to one’s emotional core to make us think and feel. “It is this poet’s calling to hold kindness and its opposite in tension. What is that opposite? The poems in this volume offer unsettling answers. With Gretchen Primack’s poems, the absence of kindness causes a quaking in our bodies. A lyrical language of the present tense evokes a fierce and tender impatience with what should never have been settled for.”

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Ryan Fogarty
We are excited about inviting local and regional actors to come and try out for roles in our simulation events and the production of a series of mini movies called Stories. Our mission at the REAL Academy is to equip social workers with the tools and confidence to make good decisions in child welfare cases. We have seen the benefits of simulation training for social workers and the best way to provide that is using skilled actors to play realistic roles that challenge students before they practice in the community. This is a great opportunity for theatre students and professional actors alike because they will be paid for their work and also contribute to communities across North Carolina.

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Enjoy a one-of-a-kind hike in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains with our friendly llamas! Hikers will learn about our famous llamas’ interesting histories and how to safely handle the animals before heading out on a hike with gorgeous mountaintop views on our private trails.
Each family/ group gets 1 to 3 lovable llamas to share and there’s plenty of time for llama cuddles and, of course, llama selfies! This moderate hike is around 1 mile long and does require requires walking uphill on rocky and sometimes slippery terrain.
Ages: We welcome all ages on our llama hikes and children 5 and under are free. When you make your reservation, please let us know if you have anyone under that age in the notes section.

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Enjoy a one-of-a-kind hike in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains with our friendly llamas! Hikers will learn about our famous llamas’ interesting histories and how to safely handle the animals before heading out on a hike with gorgeous mountaintop views on our private trails.
Each family/ group gets 1 to 3 lovable llamas to share and there’s plenty of time for llama cuddles and, of course, llama selfies! This moderate hike is around 1 mile long and does require requires walking uphill on rocky and sometimes slippery terrain.
We welcome all ages on our llama hikes and children 5 and under are free. When you make your reservation, please let us know if you have anyone under that age in the notes section.
Led by: Mark English aka “The Llama Dude”
Enjoy a one-of-a-kind hike in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains with our friendly llamas! Hikers will learn about our famous llamas’ interesting histories and how to safely handle the animals before heading out on a hike with gorgeous mountaintop views on our private trails.
Each family/ group gets 1 to 3 lovable llamas to share and there’s plenty of time for llama cuddles and, of course, llama selfies! This moderate hike is around 1 mile long and does require requires walking uphill on rocky and sometimes slippery terrain.
Duration: The total experience lasts about an hour and a half
Ages: We welcome all ages on our llama hikes and children 5 and under are free. When you make your reservation, please let us know if you have anyone under that age in the notes section.
Led by: Mark English aka “The Llama Dude”

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