Barren Magazine Poetry Contest

Ben Cutler, poet and rep for NCWN-West in Swain County won second place in the Barren Magazine poetry contest. 

https://barrenmagazine.com/to-my-eldest-at-the-age-of-burning/

Benjamin Cutler is our NCWN-West Rep for Swain County.
Learn more about Ben here,

Book release for Brent Martin June 17

Brent Martin's new collection The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present is being released by History Press on June 17th.  

He will be reading from this book on Friday, June 21st at 7:00 PM at the Macon County Public Library in Franklin, NC, 149 Siler Farm Road, Franklin NC - 28734

Brent will be leading a three day Power of Place workshop at the new Alarka Expeditions office in Franklin, beginning Monday June 10th.  

"We'll have readings and discussions on the role of place in writing, along with field trips each week to a different location for exercises in creativity.  Cost is $35 per session."  

Anyone interested can email Brent directly at alarkaexpeditions@gmail.com or visit this website: https://www.alarkaexpeditions.com/upcoming-events

People can also learn more about it on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1921247861314948/

City Lights Bookstore, Sylva, NC announces Jacar Press' publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's "Trawling the Silences," and hosts opening reading June 8, 2019

It is with great joy and sorrow that Jacar Press announces the posthumous publication of Kathryn Stripling Byer's Trawling the Silences. The book should be available late May, and City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will host an opening reading on Saturday, June 8, 2019, at 6:30. Please join us if you can.

Jacar Press will be donating proceeds from sales to a cause Kay valued. We are in the process of narrowing that down and will have a decision on that soon. 

When she died suddenly from lymphoma in June 2017, Kathryn Stripling Byer had  just completed her 7th, and what would be her last, collection of poetry, Trawling the Silences. It is a book of great beauty and heartbreak, revisiting all her important themes - family and ancestry, the natural world, the inevitable process of aging and death, and the pressing issues of environmental degradation, racism, and international conflict - with an urgency that seems, in retrospect, to have come from an awareness about what fate awaited her. Kay loved the craft of poetry and the expressive possibilities of intricate poetic structures. She wrote free verse, metrical verse, syllabic verse, and used forms as diverse as the sestina and the ghazal. Though often dense with meaning and allusion, her work remains accessible to any careful reader. 


During her writing career, Kathryn Stripling Byer received many honors and awards, including the Lamont prize for her second book, Wildwood Flower, the North Carolina Governor’s Award for Literature, in 2001, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She was the first woman to be selected as the North Carolina Poet Laureate and served from 2005 to 2009. In 2012 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

For more information, contact City Lights Bookstore at: 828-586-9499

Address:

3 East Jackson Street

Sylva, North Carolina 28779