Registration will open soon for Spring 2026 classes.
Please pay attention to the following announcements and read all course descriptions carefully before registering.
-We are offering some classes in-person and some classes via Zoom.
5-Week Classes
Applications for the Cori Gross Scholarship are open. A limited number of scholarships are available, covering the in-state tuition cost of a 5-week class. See our Scholarships page for full details.
Lang 371.EZ3: Weaving in Research Without Losing the Thread: Creative Nonfiction
Instructor: Ed Southern
CRN: 10514
Meets online via Zoom
Tuesday evenings starting 2/2, 6:00-8:30
Even the most “creative” of creative nonfiction usually requires some amount of research. Even the most fact-based nonfiction, though, needs to tell a story, preferably one that will hold the reader’s interest from start to finish. Weaving the two together seamlessly can be a writer’s most daunting challenge. Using classic and contemporary examples, as well as students’ own submitted work, this class will look at ways writers can work in all (or most) of what they’ve learned without sacrificing pace, voice, or the narrative thread.
Ed Southern is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South (Blair, 2021), a finalist for the SIBA Southern Book Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and is the editor of the anthology The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina (Blair, 2025). His work has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, North Carolina Literary Review, Salvation South, Asheville Poetry Review, storySouth, PineStraw, South Writ Large, The Dirty Spoon, Wake Forest Magazine, and elsewhere. Since 2008 he has been the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ2: Finding Voices in Feature News Storytelling
Instructor: Tiana Kennell
CRN: 10447
Meets online via Zoom
Thursday evenings starting 3/17, 6:00-8:30
Everyone has a story, but not everyone thinks they do. As feature journalists, we have the privilege of digging deeper to uncover the fascinating stories of our subjects and presenting them in a way that captivates audiences. We have the platform to be a voice for the community by letting others’ voices project through us. In this 5-week course, students will learn how to unearth lesser-known stories, deliver the news, and create impactful feature content for digital and print media.
Tiana Kennell is the Food and Dining Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. A Detroit native and Michigan State University graduate, Tiana has 20 years of journalism experience, covering food, beverage, arts, culture, entertainment, and more for multimedia outlets. For nine years, she served as the Louisiana Flavor Reporter for The Shreveport Times. In 2021, Tiana relocated from the bayous of Louisiana to the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she reports on the local and regional hospitality and agriculture industries, as well as food insecurity issues and tourism. When not watching reality television cooking shows with her partner, Russell, and their two cats, Yogurt and Tofu, Tiana enjoys writing fiction, running, dancing, costuming, and trying new recipes.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ1: Getting Published: Landing Your Work at Literary Magazines, Traditional Houses, and Everything in Between
Instructor: Savannah Brooks
CRN: 10798
Meets in-person in Asheville, NC
Thursday evenings starting 3/19, 6:00-8:30
Breaking down the publishing landscape into three sectors, this course focuses on the logistics, best approaches, and necessary materials for landing your work at literary and entertainment magazines, independent and university presses, and traditional and hybrid publishers. Students should arrive to class with three different materials prepared: (1) a polished draft of a short-form piece (poem, short story, essay), (2) an idea of a nonfiction short-form piece to be pitched (you don’t have to be a CNF writer, you just need an idea), and (3) the first page of a long-form piece (this includes the first page of a collection). Each student will leave with drafts of cover letters, short-form pitches, query letters, and long-form proposals (including author bios) that can be used as templates going forward.
This class will be more lecture- and feedback-based than generative, though students will have time to workshop their short-form work and the first page of a longer work. They can expect to receive feedback from fellow students and from the instructor, who worked in short- and long-form publishing for a decade and has more than a dozen short-form publications of her own.
Savannah Brooks earned her MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and spent the first decade of her career working in publishing, first as an editor and then as a literary agent. After contracting a debilitating illness, she left the field to focus on writing and teaching. Among other publications, her short stories have been featured in Prime Number Magazine, New Plains Review, and Inscape; her essays in The Guardian, Hobart, and Barely South Review; and her book reviews in Oyster River Pages, The Hong Kong Review, and Bridge Eight. A disabled writer suffering from the most literal of broken hearts (and stomachs), she lives in the mountains of Asheville with her two black cats, Eggs Benedict and Toaster Strudel. You can find more at savannahbrooks.com.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
10-Week Classes
Applications for the Richard Chess Scholarship are open. The Richard Chess Scholarship covers the in-state tuition cost of a 10-week class. See our Scholarships page for full details.
Lang 372.EZ1: Breaking into Blossom?: Poetic Endings
Instructor: Luke Hankins
CRN: 10565
Meets in-person in Asheville, NC
Sunday afternoons starting 2/8, 3:00-5:30
This course will begin with close readings of modern and contemporary poems that use a wide array of techniques and approaches to ending the poem: endings that crescendo and exhort, double back or taper down, those that reverse expectation, embody paradox, or enact their logic in their formal DNA. We will grapple with questions of closure, wholeness, pleasure, power, universalism, subjectivity, discord, exclusion, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment. Students will also practice revising their existing poems with new ending strategies as well as composing new poems with the aim of diversifying their approaches to poetic closure (or non-closure).
Hankins’ co-edited anthology (with Nomi Stone), Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings, will be the launching pad for discussion. The anthology also provides a taxonomy of ending types, which will provide numerous ideas for students to employ in their own work.
*Required text: Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings (ed. Hankins & Stone). We recommend purchasing the book from Malaprop’s Bookstore or Bookshop.org.*
Luke Hankins is the director of UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and is the founder and editor of the non-profit literary press Orison Books. A graduate of the Indiana University MFA Program, where he held The Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry, he is the author of several poetry collections, including MAGNITUDE: New & Selected Short Poems (Texas Review Press, 2027). Hankins has edited or co-edited a number of anthologies, including Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems (with Nomi Stone), the Best Spiritual Literature series (Orison Books), and Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings (also with Nomi Stone, forthcoming Jan. 2026). He is also the author of a book of essays, The Work of Creation, and a volume of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 372.EZ2: Writing Ghosts: A Multi-Genre Workshop
Instructor: Jamieson Ridenhour
CRN: 11188
Meets in-person in Asheville, NC
Monday evenings starting 2/16, 6:00-8:30
Every story is a ghost story, whether you are writing an actual ghost story—a piece of horror or Gothic fiction—detailing events of the past, or capturing a moment in a poem. When we tell an anecdote or a funny thing that happened to us, when we talk about the way things used to be, when we look at pieces of the past. When we feel nostalgic. When we desperately try to touch the things that have faded. Any time we remember, we’re talking about ghosts. This multi-genre generative class will explore the ways ghosts, real or imagined, can serve as metaphors, shadows, and foils for the things that really haunt us. We will analyze craft elements in model texts as well as produce original work.
Jamieson Ridenhour is a playwright, novelist, and producer of the acclaimed audio-drama Palimpsest. He has written werewolf murder-mysteries, academic studies of vampire film, and plays about punk rock. His ghost play Grave Lullaby was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s David Cohen Playwriting Award in 2012. You can find out more about his work at jamiesonridenhourwriter.com.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
15-Week Class
Lang 373.EZ1: Drafting/Crafting/Rafting the River of the Novel
Instructor: Dale Neal
CRN: 11189
Meets in-person in Asheville, NC
Wednesday evenings starting 1/14, 6:00-8:30
This class is aimed at writers eager to try their first novel or revise a messy draft. Over a semester, you won’t finish a full novel but you can develop your stamina for the long haul. In writing exercises and discussion, we’ll look at a useful toolkit for sentences and structures, openings and endings, picking POV and psychic distance, creating characters in conflict, plot and profluence, space-time traveling, and other issues. We’ll spend the last part of the semester in workshops with feedback on your own novel openings.
Dale Neal is the author of the novels Kings of Coweetsee and The Woman with the Stone Knife, honored by the N.C. Society of Historians. His other novels include Appalachian Book of the Dead, a Southern Buddhist thriller shortlisted for the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award; Cow Across America, winner of the Novello Literary Award; and The Half-Life of Home. His novella, Floodmarks, is forthcoming in 2026 from Regal House. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Our State, Smoky Mountain Living, North Carolina Literary Review, Appalachian Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Still, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in creative writing at Warren Wilson College and was a prize-winning journalist for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He also taught creative writing for Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Asheville Graduate Center. He is an associate fiction editor for Orison Books. Living in Asheville, he dodges mama bears and cubs on his morning walks up Sunset Mountain.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.