Literary Events & Competitions

Spring 2023 Events

  • 3/27, 6:00-8:00: An Evening with Lori Horvitz & Jennifer McGaha
    Join Lori Horvitz (The Girls of Usually and Collect Call to My Mother) and Jennifer McGaha (Flat Broke With Two Goats and Bushwhacking) for a memoir writing workshop followed by a reading from their new books. Both the writing workshop and the reading will be held in the Mountain View Room of the Sherrill Center on UNC Asheville Campus. The events are free to attend and open to the public, but please register in advance.

Lori Horvitz is the author of two collections of memoir-essays: Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep and The Girls of Usually. Her personal essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Under the Sun, Hobart, South Dakota Review, The Laurel Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Hotel Amerika. Professor of English at UNC Asheville, Horvitz has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, VCCA, Ragdale, Blue Mountain Center, and Brush Creek. She holds a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Albany, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.

 

  • 4/15, 10:00-12:00: “Seeing and Re-Seeing: Finding Poems in the Familiar” with Ken Chamlee
    Poems are hiding in your house! And in your garage and backyard, for that matter. This two-hour workshop will help poets (or any writer) see the gems in the junk drawer, and realize that good poems are not about subject matter but the subject’s treatment through language, comparison, and implication. Using work from his recent collection If Not These Things, Ken Chamlee will illustrate how any common but unconsidered object can be a door into a new poem by “re-seeing” it with a transformative eye. Participants will do a guided exercise of close examination, specific description, and imaginative projection, leading to a solid draft or maybe a finished poem!

    Kenneth Chamlee     is the author of If Not These Things (Kelsay Books, 2022) and The Best Material for the Artist in the World, a poetic biography of landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023). Ken’s poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Tar River Poetry, among other places. Ken teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program and is a 2023 Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society.

    This event will be held on UNCA campus, in the Manheimer Room of the Reuter Center. Registration costs $20 and is open to the public.
    Register Now

    Past Events

  • 1/31, 3:30-4:30: An Afternoon with Peter Turchi
    The Great Smokies Writing Program and the UNC Asheville Department of English welcome author Peter Turchi on Jan. 31 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. to discuss his latest book and share some of his insights into the writing process.
    Turchi is the author of seven books and the co-editor of three anthologies. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Huffington Post, Fiction Writers Review, Ploughshares, Story, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Colorado Review, among other journals. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and having a quotation from A Muse and a Maze serve as the answer to the New York Times Magazine Sunday acrostic.Following this event, at 6 p.m., Turchi will be in conversation with Laura Hope-Gill at Malaprop’s Bookstore. There he will also be signing copies of “(Don’t) Stop Me if You’ve Heard This Before: and Other Essays on Writing Fiction.”

 

  • 2/25, 10:00-12:00: Submit Your Work! A Mini-Class and Community Event with Lauren Harr
    Whether you want to submit work to a journal or magazine, a festival, a contest, an agent, or a publisher, putting your work out there can be a nerve wracking experience. We’ll offer you strategies for cover letters, queries, pitches, and bios, keeping track of your submissions, and keeping sane while you wait to hear, plus be present to answer questions for the first hour. Then, you’ll be given time to submit your work and share in the nervous excitement with a community of creatives!
    Lauren Harr is co-founder of Gold Leaf Literary Services, which provides a range of pre- and post-publication assistance for authors. She has worked in the book world for 20 years—at bookstores, literary nonprofits, and independent publishers. She will always be a bookseller at heart. For more, visit www.goldleafliterary.com.

    Check out our new events calendar to see what’s happening in the Asheville writing community!

     

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