We are seeking volunteers to assist us in our small after school program for children in West Asheville in low-income housing.  We provide a safe and nourishing environment, healthy snacks, and creative activities.  Our program currently meets during the school year on most Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3:00-5:00pm. You may volunteer for one or two days a week. 

Volunteer Responsibilities:

• Assist with serving snacks
• Interact with children during activity time
• Supervise games and outdoor free time
• For people with background in education, there is also an opportunity to assist with curriculum development and program planning and administration

Requirements:

• Background check
• Orientation booklets will be provided
• Masks are required if unvaccinated

Thomas Wolfe Short Story Discussions are a partnership between the Wilma Dykeman Legacy and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site. Our text is The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp with a Foreword by James Dickey (New York: Scribner’s, 1987).

We’re putting our build crew back together and we’d love to have you join us. Every 2 weeks, we’ll meet at 9 am for hands-on set construction! Whether your talents are building, painting, or you just want to learn, come out and join us every other Saturday for some creative fun. Tools and work gloves are helpful but not required

The Western North Carolina Historical Association (WNCHA) is proud to participate in the American Battlefield Trust’s annual Park Day. On this day, volunteers across the country team up to clean, maintain, and learn about the history of battlefields and site associated with the American Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War. Our event takes place on the grounds of the Smith-McDowell House, the headquarters of WNCHA and also a site related to the American Civil War. Volunteers of all ages are welcome! The day’s activities begin with sign-in at 9am on the patio at the rear entrance to Smith-McDowell House. Volunteers will rake leaves, pick up debris, spread mulch, weed gardens, clear dead shrubs and trees, and plant new ones (if available). We are committed to maintaining the Olmsted landscape restored for us by the Men’s Garden Club of Asheville. We are grateful for their participation. We will provide bottled water as well as pizza, and will feature an educational speaker at lunch time. Please help us plan by registering in advance and letting us know your lunch preferences (either pepperoni or cheese pizza)

Let’s all PULL together to Pick Up Leicester Litter and make our community a cleaner and safer place to live! Bags, gloves, safety vests, etc will be provided by AVL Greenworks.

We invite everyone to this event who will enjoy a cleaner Leicester landscape!

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)

We are seeking volunteers to assist us in our small after school program for children in West Asheville in low-income housing.  We provide a safe and nourishing environment, healthy snacks, and creative activities.  Our program currently meets during the school year on most Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3:00-5:00pm. You may volunteer for one or two days a week. 

Volunteer Responsibilities:

• Assist with serving snacks
• Interact with children during activity time
• Supervise games and outdoor free time
• For people with background in education, there is also an opportunity to assist with curriculum development and program planning and administration

Requirements:

• Background check
• Orientation booklets will be provided
• Masks are required if unvaccinated

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.

We are seeking volunteers to assist us in our small after school program for children in West Asheville in low-income housing.  We provide a safe and nourishing environment, healthy snacks, and creative activities.  Our program currently meets during the school year on most Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3:00-5:00pm. You may volunteer for one or two days a week. 

Volunteer Responsibilities:

• Assist with serving snacks
• Interact with children during activity time
• Supervise games and outdoor free time
• For people with background in education, there is also an opportunity to assist with curriculum development and program planning and administration

Requirements:

• Background check
• Orientation booklets will be provided
• Masks are required if unvaccinated

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!

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].

We have three opportunities for you to help Connect Beyond AND see some music! We need volunteers to assist with wristbands for three shows this summer at Harrah’s Cherokee Center – Asheville in Downtown Asheville, N.C. Shifts are roughly (3) hours and all participating volunteers will also receive (1) free ticket to stay after and watch the show. The following dates and shows are available: May 7th: Gojira and Mastodon June 13th: boygenius August 12th: Motionless in White