Registration is open 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 2/3, 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.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
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Lang 371.EZ2: Finding Voices in Feature News Storytelling
Instructor: Tiana Kennell
CRN: 10447
Meets online via Zoom
Tuesday 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.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
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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 at Grace Episcopal Church 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.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
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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 at Grace Episcopal Church 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.*
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
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Lang 372.EZ2: Writing Ghosts: A Multi-Genre Workshop
Instructor: Jamieson Ridenhour
CRN: 11188
Meets in-person at Hanger Hall School 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.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
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15-Week Class
Lang 373.EZ1: Drafting/Crafting/Rafting the River of the Novel
Instructor: Dale Neal
CRN: 11189
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville Reuter Center (OLLI) 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.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Register Now