Local poet Brenda Kay Ledford to read at Coffee With the Poets and Writers, on Wednesday, April 19, 2017, 10:30 AM, at the Moss Memorial Library, Hayesville, NC

Coffee with the Poets and Writers, a monthly literary event held at Moss Memorial Library, 26 Anderson Street, Hayesville, NC, will hold a reading at 10:30 AM, Wednesday, April 19, 2017. Brenda Kay Ledford, award winning poet and native of Clay County is featured on the program this month.

Ledford is a seventh-generational native of Clay County. She was an honor graduate of Hayesville High School, earned her MA in Education from Western Carolina University, and received a diploma of highest honors in Creative Writing from Stratford Career Institute.

Ledford's work has appeared in many journals including Our State, Woman's World, Country Extra, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Angels on Earth, 30 Old Mountain Press anthologies, and Blue Ridge Parkway Silver Anniversary Edition coffee-table book.

Aldrich Press published her poetry book, Crepe Roses, which won the 2015 Paul GreenMultimedia Award from the North Carolina Society of Historians. Ledford has received this award nine times for her books, her collections of oral history on Southern Appalachia, and her blogs:  http://blueridgepoet.blogspot.com and http://historicalhayesville.blogspot.com.  She also won the North Carolina Press Association's Journalism Contest Award for her feature on the John C. Campbell Folk School in 1999.

Ledford is listed with A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, North Carolina Literary Map, North Carolina Storytelling Guild, and Who's Who in America. She has appeared on the "Common Cup," talk show on Windstream Communication's cable television and has interviewed on "The Blue Sky Show" on WJUL/WJRB Radio Station. Additionally, Ledford gives regional poetry readings.

We welcome the public to join us at Coffee with the Poets and Writers. Please listen and enjoy, or read a poem or short prose piece at Open Mic. We are a friendly audience. After the meeting, we go out to lunch and invite our guests to join us.

NCWN-West is a program of the largest literary organization in the state of North Carolina, The North Carolina Writers' Network. Contact Glenda Beall, 828-389-4441 or gcbmountaingirl@gmail.com for more information.