
WYATT EARP AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY, An Historical Literary Fiction Trilogy on the Life of Wyatt Earp by Mark Warren
“Think you don’t like to read Westerns? Adobe Moon will change your mind.” ~ Allison Marlowe, Gulf Coast News Today.
Western historian Mark Warren’s award winning trilogy Wyatt Earp, An American Odyssey transports the reader back to the 19th century West.
“…Warren is able to convey scenes with a cinematic clarity…” ~ Peta Stevalli on Born to the Badge, New Zealand Booklovers

GIVING KIDS A HEAD START Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library – Buncombe County Literary Council
According to the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children. The key is to start reading to them at birth.

The Rememberists
By Kara Imle
I’ve been a memoirist since childhood. It started with drawing. Pencil gripped in my fist, I scrawled out the things I saw in my head: herds of horses; packs of wolves; a toothy, bat-winged dragon. These creatures did things I witnessed in my dreams and in my waking life, as I tumbled about in the woods or stared spacily at the walls while my mother tried to get my attention. The adults around me hailed my scrawlings as budding creativity, but to me it was only an observational skill. Perhaps they’re one and the same. CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE
Feature photo by Ross Henderson in Unsplash. Thank you!

LISA UNGER BASKIN COLLECTION – Duke University Libraries “The unifying thread is that women have always been productive and working people and this history essentially has been hidden.”
Collection Overview
The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection arrived at Rubenstein Library in April 2015. Carefully assembled over forty-five years by noted bibliophile, activist, and collector Lisa Unger Baskin, the collection is a transformative body of material documenting women at work. In Baskin’s own words,
“The unifying thread is that women have always been productive and working people and this history essentially has been hidden.”

A HISTORY OF MALAPROPS by Emoke B’Racz
A History of Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café By Emoke B’Racz My love of books came naturally: it is an inheritance from my grandmother, who always told us that our only wealth was what we had in our heads, what we learned, because all else can be taken away.

A Viral List of Hundreds of Opportunities for Artists, Compiled by One Person to Encourage Community
By Sarah Rose Sharp in Hyperallergic
Everest Pipkin has made public their “Big Artist Opportunities List” — a collection of over 400 opportunities for artists across the globe.
With the overwhelming reality that artists are expected to somehow maintain a practice, store and ship work, support their scene, self-promote, manage open accounts with galleries — all generally on spec, at least starting out — plus do whatever it takes to pay their bills, who has the time or bandwidth to keep track of opportunities to further one’s practice?

MOUNTAIN OF WORDS An Intergenerational Literary & Art Celebration at the YMI
Free Event, so you are welcome to join us even without a ticket but the RSVP is helpful for our planning.
And, if you need childcare, we ask that you register with the number and ages of children so that we are prepared to provide them with their best experience! CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS

THE WRITERS’ WORKSHOP of Asheville
Serving writers in the Southeast and beyond since 1985
“The Writers’ Workshop is a community treasure that deserves to be nurtured and supported“ – John le Carre

“Children need art and stories and poems and music as much as they need love and food and fresh air and play. “
Wise words from Philip Pullman, who received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2005:
Children need art and stories and poems and music as much as they need love and food and fresh air and play. If you don’t give a child food, the damage quickly becomes visible. If you don’t let a child have fresh air and play, the damage is also visible, but not so quickly. If you don’t give a child love, the damage might not be seen for some years, but it’s permanent.

THE NEW COLUSSUS by Emma Lazarus (followed by Readers’ Poems for 2017)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

THE SHINING ROCK POETRY ANTHOLOGY & BOOK REVIEW New Issue 2020
I am thrilled to announce that with the help of my co-editor, Daniel T. O’Hara, our Book Review Editor, Vanessa Loh, and our Cover Editor, artist Rosie Bruno, Issue 9, a whopper of a Double Issue of The Shining Rock Poetry Anthology & Book Review, is now free and online.

This Conversation is the BREAK YOU NEED – Introducing the Youth Poet Laureates
We introduced two Youth Poet Laureates over Zoom. Dive into their conversation in Lily Lines at the Washington Post – Story by Madeline Weinfield, Illustrations by Maria Alconanda Brooks
You probably know that there is a United States Poet Laureate, but you would be forgiven for never having heard of the Youth Poet Laureate. This country has had a Poet Laureate for nearly a century, but it took until 2017 to formally celebrate the work of young poets with an official title. It was Urban Word, one of the oldest youth literary arts organizations in America, that instituted the position, utilizing panels of esteemed writers to select a Youth Poet Laureate each year not only for their art, but also for their activism. Featured photo by Hugo Ruiz CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE
Writing Women Back into History
MARCH is National Women’s History Month The overarching theme for March 2010 is Writing Women Back into History In 2010, in celebration of our 30th Anniversary, we’ll highlight themes from previous years, ones that recognize a different aspect of women’s achievements…

“Words,” we are fond of saying around here, “mean things”.
AP Updates
The inference is that those of us in the communications business should not toss the tools of our trade around carelessly; that we should respect their meaning and nuances, and use them precisely to express what we want to say. (first published Mar 03, 2013)

Under the Mercy Trees on Audiobook
Heather Newton’s novel Under the Mercy Trees, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, is now available on audiobook from Dreamscape Media. Download it today on Libro.fm, Audible or your favorite audiobook platform.

The Secret Society of Women Writers in Oxford in the 1920s
In Literary Hub: By Mo Moulton on the Legendary Mutual Admiration Society
It began in a quiet sort of way, over hot cocoa and toasted marshmallows in a student room at Somerville College, Oxford. One evening in November 1912, some new friends, all first-year students, gathered “to read aloud our literary efforts and to receive and deliver criticism.” They brought stories, poems, essays, plays, and fables, and they received far more than merely criticism. In the firelight, over economical treats, they created a space in which they could grow beyond the limitations of Edwardian girlhood and become complex, creative adults with a radically capacious notion of what it might mean to be both human and female. CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

ADRIENNE RICH on the Political Power of Poetry and Its Role in the Immigrant Experience
One summer evening not long ago, on a rainy Brooklyn rooftop, a friend — a brilliant friend who studies the cosmos and writes uncommonly poetic novels — stunned me with an improbable, deceptively simple yet enormous question: “What does poetry do?”
I fumbled for Baldwin: “The poets [are] the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” And then I mumbled something about how poetry gives shape to our experiences through language, thus conferring validity and dignity upon them, enlarging our access to our own humanity. CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE

WNC LEGACY: LITERATURE & BOOKSELLER Emoke Brac’z – A Life in Bookselling & The History of Malaprops
May, 2018
When I opened the doors of Malaprop’s thirty years ago on June 1, 1982, the first people who walked in the door were a threesome–Marnie, Sandi, and Gretchen. My first customer was a gentleman. We talked for a while and he purchased the Selected Works of Herman Melville, the Random House edition.

SHINING ROCK POETRY ANTHOLOGY & BOOK REVIEW Summer 2019
Shining Rock is a mountain in Appalachian North Carolina; we choose it as a title for our anthology because of its metaphorical properties. As co-editors, we come to poetry with a strong commitment to the literary traditions that challenge readers to become continually educated by poetry.

WOMEN WRITERS of Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College has attained near-myth status for the prominent roles it played in modern art, in the Beat poetry movement, and as a groundbreaking experiment in sociology. From its inception in 1933 until its closing in 1955, the college was populated by nonconformists and free thinkers.