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.

Saturday, April 24, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
Apr 24 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Independent Bookstore Day
Apr 24 @ 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Malaprop's Bookstore

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 PattersonStephen 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

Monday, April 26, 2021
Science Fiction Book Club
Apr 26 @ 7:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

This club will meet virtually via zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Please email [email protected] for the link to join!  

Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Allison Beatty to dive into the wreck of the wily and wonderful world of sci-fi, weird fiction, speculative fiction, literary horror, and disturbing fiction with a healthy mix of underappreciated classic and contemporary books. The club normally meets at Malaprop’s on the last Monday of every month at 7:00pm.

Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Live Stream: Jennifer Lapidus Launches Southern Ground, in conversation with Chef Andrea Reusing
Apr 27 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

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. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!


At Carolina Ground flour mill in Asheville, North Carolina, Jennifer Lapidus is transforming bakery offerings across the southern United States with intensely flavorful flour, made from grains grown and cold stone-milled in the heart of the South. While delivering extraordinary taste, texture, and story, cold stone-milled flour also allows bakers to move away from industrial commodity flours to create sustainable and artisanal products.

In Southern Ground, Lapidus celebrates the incredible work of craft bakers from all over the South. With detailed profiles on top Southern bakers and more than seventy-five highly curated recipes arranged by grain, Southern Ground harnesses the wisdom and knowledge that the baking community has gained. Lapidus showcases superior cold stone-milled flour and highlights the importance of baking with locally farmed ingredients while providing instruction and insight into how to use and enjoy these geographically distinct flavor-forward flours. Southern Ground is a love letter to Southern baking and a call for the home baker to understand the source and makeup of the most important of ingredients: flour.

Jennifer Lapidus is the founder and principal of Carolina Ground flour mill in Asheville, North Carolina. She launched Natural Bridge Bakery in 1994, where she milled her flours in-house and baked her naturally leavened breads in a wood-fired brick oven. Her bakery was the first of its kind in western North Carolina and was featured in Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads. Jennifer has appeared on The Splendid Table podcast and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Saveur, Taste of the South, and numerous other local publications. Jennifer sits on the board of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and is co-organizer of the Asheville Bread Festival.

Andrea Reusing is the chef and owner of Lantern, where she collaborates with small farms and producers across North Carolina and is an advocate for food policy change. Reusing was the recipient of the James Beard Award for “Best Chef: Southeast” in 2011 and Lantern was named one of Gourmet Magazine’s America’s Top 50 Restaurants and one of “America’s 50 Most Amazing Wine Experiences” in Food & Wine. In 2011, Reusing published her cookbook, Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes. An absorbing journey through a year in her home kitchen as she cooks for family and friends, the book was named one of the most notable cookbooks of the year by The New York Times. Reusing was the founding chef of The Durham Hotel, home to her rooftop raw bar and American restaurant that was included in Bon Appétit’s 50 Best New Restaurants list and was named The News & Observer’s Restaurant of the Year in 2017. Her next Durham project is an homage to her grandmother and her basement game room, where she made pickles and dandelion wine. Reusing is the founder of Kitchen Patrol, Lantern’s project to improve children’s access to quality food through weekly cooking classes, and serves on the board of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Live Stream: Gavin Larsen Launches Being a Ballerina, in conversation with Shannon Wheeler
Apr 28 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

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!


Inspiring, revealing, and deeply relatable, Being a Ballerina is a firsthand look at the realities of life as a professional ballet dancer. Through episodes from her own career, Gavin Larsen describes the forces that drive a person to study dance; the daily balance that dancers navigate between hardship and joy; and the dancer’s continual quest to discover who they are as a person and as an artist.

Starting with her arrival as a young beginner at a class too advanced for her, Larsen tells how the embarrassing mistake ended up helping her learn quickly and advance rapidly. In other stories of her early teachers, training, and auditions, she explains how she gradually came to understand and achieve what she and her body were capable of.

Larsen then re-creates scenes from her experiences in dance companies, from unglamorous roles to exhilarating performances. Working as a ballerina was shocking and scary at first, she says, recalling unexpected injuries, leaps of faith, and her constant struggle to operate at the level she wanted–but full of enormously rewarding moments. Larsen also reflects candidly on her difficult decision to retire at age 35.

An ideal read for aspiring dancers, Larsen’s memoir will also delight experienced dance professionals and fascinate anyone who wonders what it takes to live a life dedicated to the perfection of the art form.

Gavin Larsen was a professional ballet dancer for 18 years before retiring in 2010. A principal dancer with the Oregon Ballet Theatre, she also danced with the Suzanne Farrell Ballet and Alberta Ballet and as a guest artist with Ballet Victoria. She has written for Pointe, Dance Teacher, Dance Spirit, Dancing Times, Oregon ArtsWatch, Dance/USA’s From the Green Room, the Maine Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She writes and teaches in Asheville, North Carolina.

Thursday, April 29, 2021
Live Stream: Betty Kilby Baldwin and Phoebe Kilby present Cousins
Apr 29 @ 6:00 pm
Live Stream w/ Malaprop's

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!


Connected through slavery, a Black woman and a White woman discover their past—and each other.

What happens when a White woman, Phoebe, contacts a Black woman, Betty, saying she suspects they are connected through slavery? First surprise? Betty responds, “Hello, Cousin.”

Betty had fought for an education and won. She broke through the concrete ceiling in the workplace and succeeded. A documentary of her life was about to debut. Without thinking, she invites Phoebe to a family dinner and the premiere of the documentary. Second surprise? She forgot to tell her family who was coming to dinner.

Betty finds an activist partner in Phoebe. Cousins indeed, they commit to a path of reconciliation.

In alternating chapters, each tells her dramatic story—from Betty’s experience as one of the first Black children to attend her desegregated school, to Phoebe’s eventual question to Betty: “How do I begin to repair the harms?”

Piercingly honest. Includes a working reparations project which the two women conceived together.

Friday, April 30, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
Apr 30 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Cooking with Truffles: A Chef’s Guide, in conversation with Mark Rosenstein
Apr 30 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

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. Thank you!

Saturday, May 1, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 1 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Sunday, May 2, 2021
Poetrio: Fleda Brown, Rita Quillen, Gretchen Primack
May 2 @ 3:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

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.

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.

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.”

Tuesday, May 4, 2021
WILD (Women in Lively Discussion) Book Club
May 4 @ 6:30 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

Check the WILD book club’s Facebook page for COVID-19 related updates. Please RSVP the moderator at [email protected] for the Zoom meeting passcode for the meetings.  

Join former Malaprop’s General Manager Linda-Marie Barrett for this woman-only book club that seeks to have fun by reading books (fiction & non) by women writers. Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

The club meets at 6:30 P.M. on the first Tuesday of the month at the Battery Park Book Exchange. It will be held virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thursday, May 6, 2021
Crime and Politics Book Club
May 6 @ 7:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

The Crime and Politics Book Club will be held virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic. Please email [email protected] for info and instructions to attend. 

Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Patricia Furnish to discuss a range of books across true crime and public affairs. The club meets the first Thursday of the month at 7 p.m. Click here to learn more about the club, view important news, and find the pick for this month.

Friday, May 7, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 7 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Saturday, May 8, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 8 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Monday, May 10, 2021
Mystery Book Club
May 10 @ 7:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

The club will meet virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic. If you are interested in attending, please email [email protected] for instructions about how to attend the club event.  

Join host Tena Frank for Malaprop’s Mystery Book Club! Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!

The club meets at Malaprop’s on the second Monday of every month at 7:00pm.

Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Discussion Bound Book Club: I Always Loved You: A Novel by Robin Oliveira
May 11 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Online w/ Asheville Art Museum

The young Mary Cassatt never thought moving to Paris after the Civil War to be an artist was going to be easy. When, after a decade of work, her submission to the Paris Salon is rejected, Cassatt’s fierce determination wavers. Her father is begging her to return to Philadelphia to find a husband before it is too late; her sister Lydia is falling mysteriously ill; and worse, she is beginning to doubt herself. Then one evening a friend introduces her to Edgar Degas, and her life changes forever. Years later she will learn that he had begged for the introduction, but in that moment their meeting seems a miracle. So begins the defining period of her life and the most tempestuous of relationships. In I Always Loved You, Oliveira brilliantly recreates the irresistible world of Belle-Époque Paris, writing with grace and uncommon insight into the passion and foibles of the human heart.

Moderated by Barbara Pressman, touring docent. Presented in conjunction with Across the Atlantic: American Impressionism Through the French Lens and Intersections in American Art.

Meeting each second Tuesday at 12pm, this monthly discussion is a place to exchange ideas about readings that relate to artworks and the art world, and to learn from and about each other. Pick up some tasty local fare at the Malaprop’s Café to make the most of your midday break! Books are available at Malaprop’s for a 10% discount.

Generous support for this program is provided by Art Bridges.

 

 

LitCafe: Mary Burnette presents Lige of the Black Walnut Tree
May 11 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Online w/ Western North Carolina Historical Association (WNCHA)

LitCafe: Mary Othella Burnette presents Lige of the Black Walnut Tree

For the third installment of this year’s LitCafe series, we are very excited to bring you author and local native Mary Othella Burnette who will present her recently published memoir Lige of the Black Walnut Tree: Growing Up Black in Southern Appalachia. This virtual event begins at 6pm Tuesday, May 11. Mary’s presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. We hope to see you there!

About the Author:

Her memoir, Lige of the Black Walnut Tree: Growing Up Black in Southern Appalachia, depicts life in a close-knit community settled by former slaves. Her vibrant stories bring to life the unimaginable world of her rustic youth and open a new window into an area of Black History little known to the outside world and rarely described by a native Black mountaineer. Ms. Burnette grew up among her very real characters, ate at their tables, slept in their homes, and was determined to preserve her memory of Lige, one of her father’s favorite cousins who had passed away long before she was born.

 

You must pre-register and purchase a ticket for this event. A Zoom link will be sent for participants to join.

For questions email Trevor Freeman at [email protected]

Friday, May 14, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 14 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Saturday, May 15, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 15 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Monday, May 17, 2021
Live Stream: Dual Event with Joseph Fink + Meg Bashwiner and Jonny Sun
May 17 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's Bookstore

Joseph Fink created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts and is the author of the novel Alice Isn’t Dead, and co-author of the New York Times best-selling novels Welcome to Night Vale, It Devours!, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, and four Welcome to Night Vale episode script books: Mostly Void, Partially Stars, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, The Buying of Lot 37, and Who’s a Good Boy.

Meg Bashwiner is a writer, performer, tour manager, podcaster and producer. She is the emcee for the international touring live show of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast. She is an alumni member of the acclaimed New York theater company The New York Neo-Futurists. They live in the Hudson Valley and Los Angeles.

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!

Order GOODBYE, AGAIN below to get a book signed by Jonny Sun and a limited edition leaf pin! (While supplies last.)

Copies of THE FIRST TEN YEARS ordered from Malaprop’s come with a bookplate signed by Joseph Fink and Meg Bashwiner. (While supplies last.)

Tuesday, May 18, 2021
Live Stream: Ayanna Thompson presents Blackface, with Natalie Hopkinson
May 18 @ 7:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's Bookstore

Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) at Arizona State University. For more information, visit her website, https://www.ayannathompson.com

Natalie Hopkinson is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Media Studies at Howard University. She is the author of Go-Go Live (Duke University Press, 2012) and A Mouth is Always Muzzled (The New Press, 2018). For more information, visit her website.

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 on YouTube. (Note that this event was rescheduled from April 21.)

The event is co-sponsored by Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA and Source Booksellers in Detroit, MI.

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 or our Indie co-sponsors. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our local communities. You may also support the Malaprop’s staff and work connecting authors and readers by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!

Friday, May 21, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 21 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Saturday, May 22, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 22 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Tuesday, May 25, 2021
Live Stream: Jeremy Jones: Bearwallow in Paperback, with Ronni Lundy
May 25 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's Bookstore

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!


Across the Blue Ridge Mountains stretches a world both charming and complicated.
Jeremy Jones and his wife move into a small house above the creek where his family had settled 200 years prior. He takes a job alongside his former teachers in the local elementary school and sets out on a search to understand how this ancient land has shaped its people-how it shaped him. His search sends him burrowing in the past-hunting buried treasure and POW camps, unearthing Civil War graves and family feuds, exploring gated communities and tourist traps, encountering changed accents and immigrant populations, tracing Wal-Mart’s sidewalks and carved-out mountains-and pondering the future. He meshes narrative and myth, geology and genealogy, fiddle tunes and local color about the briskly changing and oft-stigmatized world of his native southern Appalachians.
Somehow, these journeys continually lead him back to the mystical Bearwallow Mountain, a peak suddenly in flux.

Jeremy B. Jones is the author of the memoir Bearwallow, which was named the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and awarded gold in memoir in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. His essays appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Oxford American, Appalachian Reckoning, and The Iowa Review. Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and now serves as an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University, where he teaches creative writing and directs the Spring Literary Festival. Alongside Elena Passarello, Jeremy is the series co-editor of In Place, a nonfiction book series from West Virginia University Press.

Born in Corbin, Kentucky, RONNI LUNDY has long chronicled the people of the hillbilly diaspora as a journalist and cookbook author. She is the former restaurant reviewer and music critic for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, former editor of Louisville Magazine, and has contributed to many national magazines. Her book Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken was recognized by Gourmet magazine as one of six essential books on Southern cooking. In 2009, Lundy received the Southern Foodways Alliance Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award. She has contributed to Eating Well,GourmetBon AppétitEsquire, and other magazines.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Live Stream: Kevin McIlvoy: One Kind Favor, in conversation with Steve Almond
May 26 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's Bookstore

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!


Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident in 2014, One Kind Favor explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. After the lynching of Lincoln Lennox is discovered and subsequently covered up in the small fictional community of Cord, North Carolina, the ghosts who frequent the all-in-one bar and consignment shop take on the responsibility of unearthing the truth and acting as the memory for the town that longs to forget and continues to hate. A reimagined Kathy Acker, the groundbreaking literary icon, engages Lincoln in a love triangle and brings a transgressive post-punk esthetic to the mission. The down-the-rabbit-hole satirical storytelling of One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy’s sixth novel, echoes Appalachian ghost stories in which haunting presences will, at last, have their way.

Kevin McIlvoy is the author of seven previous books: five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of prose poetry. A retired Regents Professor of Creative Writing from New Mexico State University, he teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina. Find Kevin online at kevinmcilvoy.com;
facebook.com/kevin.mcilvoy; Twitter @KevinMcIlvoy; and Instagram @kevin.mcilvoyager.

Steve Almond is the author of eleven books, including the NYT bestsellers “Candyfreak” and “Against Football.” His work has appeared in venues ranging from the Best American Short Stories to the New York Times Magazine. https://stevealmondjoy.org/

Thursday, May 27, 2021
Live Stream: David Swinson City on the Edge, in conversation with Ryan Gattis
May 27 @ 6:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's Bookstore

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!


In the wake of a baffling tragedy, 13-year-old Graham moves with his family to Beirut, Lebanon, a city on the edge of the sea and cataclysmic violence. Inquisitive and restless by nature, Graham suspects his State Department father is a CIA operative, and that their family’s fragile domesticity is merely a front for American efforts along the nearby Israeli border. Over the course of one year, 1972, Graham’s life will utterly change. Two men are murdered, his parent’s marriage disintegrates, and Graham, along with his two ex-pat friends, run afoul of forces they cannot understand.

The City on the Edge is elegiac, atmospheric, and utterly authentic. It’s the story of innocents caught within the American net of espionage, of the Lebanese transformed by such interference, of the children who ran dangerously beside the churning wheel of history. One part Stephen King’s “The Body” and another John le Carre’s A Perfect Spy, it’s a transformative crime story told with heart and genuine experience.

David Swinson grew up in Washington, DC, Beirut, Mexico City and Stockholm, the son of a foreign service officer. He is a retired police detective from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, having been assigned to Major Crimes. Swinson is the author of The Second Girl, Crime Song and Trigger. He lives with his wife and daughter in Northern Virginia.

Ryan Gattis (ryangattis.com) is the author of SAFE, KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL, THE SYSTEM, and ALL INVOLVED, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Lire Award for Noir of the Year (France). He lives and writes in South Los Angeles, where he is a member of art collective UGLARworks and a PEN America Prison Writing Mentor.

Friday, May 28, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 28 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Saturday, May 29, 2021
Wild and Furry Animals Book Donates to Help Wildlife
May 29 all-day
Online w/ Appalachian Wildlife Refuge

Appalachian Wildlife Refuge is a registered non-profit rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing orphaned and injured wildlife, and serving 18 counties across WNC. They provide conservation education to the community, support the wildlife rehabilitation network, and offer a Wildlife Emergency Hotline to the public.  For help with wildlife in need, call 828-633-6364 ext 1 and leave a message or email [email protected], and a member of the hotline team will reach out right away. To learn more and support their cause, visit www.appalachianwild.org

Monday, May 31, 2021
May Book Club- The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
May 31 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Smokey Park Supper Club
We did a poll last month and set up the choices ahead this time, so next up we have The Night Tiger! It sounded like a few people were interested at the time, so we’re hoping to have a great turnout.

A few of us also discussed getting together in person again, and I think it’s time! I know we’re all excited to see each other again, and it’s been far too long sitting in front of a screen. I’m guessing our numbers will go back up once we meet in person again too, can’t wait to see everyone again and meet some new people too!

I thought it made sense to go back to the place where we met years ago and especially because of their great outdoor seating. If you’ve never been to a meeting with us at Smoky Park Supper Club, they have several picnic tables outside and it’s a perfect spot to meet as a club 🙂

What we’re about

Let’s start a book club and make friends while we enjoy some of the greatest books of all time!

Science Fiction Book Club
May 31 @ 7:00 pm
Online w/ Malaprop's

This club will meet virtually via zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Please email [email protected] for the link to join!  

Join host and Malaprop’s Bookseller Allison Beatty to dive into the wreck of the wily and wonderful world of sci-fi, weird fiction, speculative fiction, literary horror, and disturbing fiction with a healthy mix of underappreciated classic and contemporary books. The club normally meets at Malaprop’s on the last Monday of every month at 7:00pm.

Click here to see a full schedule of what the club is reading. Club attendees get 10% off the book at Malaprop’s!