July's Coffee With the Poets and Writers

Coffee with the Poets and Writers meets Wednesday, July 9, at 10:30 a.m. at Blue Mountain Coffee and Grill on the corner of Hwy 141 and Hwy 64 in Cherokee County, NC. The community is welcome and visitors are invited to participate at open mic by signing up to read a short prose piece or a couple of poems.

Featured this month is Glenda C. Beall, poet and writer from Hayesville, NC. Beall's poems have appeared for the past nineteen years in literary journals and magazines such as Main Street Rag, Appalachian Heritage and Journal of Kentucky Studies. Her work can be found online in Wild Goose Poetry Review, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Your Daily Poem as well as in anthologies, Kakalak, Carolina Poets 2009 and On Our Own, Widowhood for Smarties. Recently a poem was selected for the Reach of Song anthology published by the Georgia Poetry Society, and another is forthcoming in The Southern Poetry Review VII, North Carolina.

She is author of Now Might as Well be Then, a poetry chapbook, published by Finishing Line Press. Her nonfiction has been published in Reunion Magazine, Bereavement magazine, and in several anthologies including Echoes Across the Blue Ridge, and Cup of Comfort for Horse Lovers.

Beall's writing is influenced by her rural upbringing with six brothers and sisters. Like most poets and writers she observes people, nature, and happenings around her. She uses these observations to create images in her poems, stories and essays. She says she writes to communicate her thoughts and feelings with her readers. She believes poetry should be accessible to the non-writer as well as to other poets. 

A former Program Coordinator for the NC Writers' Network-West, she continues to volunteer as Clay County Representative and facilitator of Coffee with the Poets and Writers. For the past five years she has been owner/director of Writers Circle around the Table, where she has brought outstanding writers and poets from Atlanta, Charlotte, and Hickory, NC as well as the best local writers to teach at her studio. Beall will teach a writing class in August at Tri-County Community College.

For more information about Coffee with the Poets and Writers, call 828-389-4441.