That Time Again! Open Mic in Jackson!

Jackson's branch of Netwest will host its monthly Open Mic night this coming Friday, September 16th, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva (Spring Street), 7:00 p.m.  Signup begins at 6:45; all writers have ten minutes to read, unless numbers force us to lower that time (so far it hasn't happened.)  There'll be beverages, including wine, and desserts, and good fellowship from supportive fellow writers--come on out!

Waking Up Your Brain, a free creativity workshop with Joan Ellen Gage, Saturday, September 24, 2016, Hayesville, NC

Upcoming Events

Book Festival in Atlanta is Worth the Trip


Labor Day Weekend: Karen Paul Holmes and many other poets and authors will appear at the largest independent book festival in the country. September 2-4. Full schedule is here: Decatur Book Festival








Writers' Night Out: Jim May To Read from His New Book

Friday, Sept. 9: Young Harris College professors, Chelsea Rathburn and James May, will read their award-winning poems at Writers' Night Out at 7 pm. at the Union County Community Center in Blairsville, GA.

The married couple are both well-published poets who moved to the area from Atlanta to teach English and creative writing at Young Harris College in 2013. Social hour begins at 6 p.m. (dinner available for purchase upstairs in The View Grill but please arrive no later than 6) with the reading at 7 p.m. in the ballroom. An open microphone follows for those who’d like to showcase their own writing.

Rathburn is author of two full-length poetry collections, A Raft of Grief (Autumn House Press, 2013) and The Shifting Line, winner of the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award, as well as a poetry chapbook, Unused Lines (Aralia Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in many prestigious journals such as The Atlantic, Poetry, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and New England Review, and her prose has appeared in Creative Nonfiction. In 2009, she received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She directs the creative writing program at YHC.

May is the author of Unquiet Things (Louisiana State University Press, 2016).  The winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award in 2016, his poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, New England Review, New Ohio Review, The New Republic, Rattle, The Southern Review and elsewhere. The former editor of New South, he has received scholarships from The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Inprint, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar. In 2013, he won the Collins Award from Birmingham Poetry Review.