POETRY READINGS THIS WEEKEND

This weekend offers two reading/signing events in the WNC area. Cecilia Woloch and Kathryn S. Byer will be featured in both. On Saturday evening at 7:00 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva,Woloch and Byer will join Mary Adams as she launches her new chapbook Commandment, hot off the press from Spring Street Editions. Mary is a member of the WCU English Faculty; she has been awarded an NEA fellowship and saw her first collection, Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, published by the University of Florida Press.


On Sunday, December 6, 2009, Malaprop's Bookstore/Café (55 Haywood
Street in downtown Asheville, NC) will host poets Kathryn Stripling
Byer reading from ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009; Julia Nunnally
Duncan with AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and new, unpublished poems; and
Cecilia Woloch, author of CARPATHIA.

Kathryn Stripling Byer, poet laureate of North Carolina from 2005
through June 30, 2009, was born in Southwest Georgia but moved to North
Carolina in 1968 and has lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains ever since.
She is the author of five poetry books, including COMING TO REST
(2006), and most recently (in collaboration with Penelope Scambly
Schott) of the chapbook ARETHA'S HAT: INAUGURATION DAY, 2009. Writing
on the topic "Why We Love North Carolina" for the February 2009 issue
of Our State magazine, Kathryn Stripling Byer noted these particular
highlights of her term as Poet Laureate: the "generous community of
[North Carolina] writers . . . who continue to amaze me with their
talent and energy" and most of all, "the students I've met in our
schools . . . these young faces looking back at me, ready to say who
they are. May we all listen well to them." As poet laureate, Kathryn
Stripling Byer's primary goal was to "help make poetry accessible in as
many ways as I could," through frequent visits to schools and with
writing groups; appearances at bookstores, literary events, and a
variety of public celebrations; a regularly updated poetry page on the
North Carolina Arts Council web site; and her own generous laureate
blog -- as well as by continuing to write and give public readings of her
own poetry. In the process, she has demonstrated the perseverance and
constant delicate balance of energies required to lead a very public
life as a dedicated writer. Asked why she writes poetry, she recently
replied, "It's the best way I know to sing with the world" (Writer's
Digest interview with Robert Lee Brewer, July 2009). We are very happy
to welcome Kathryn Stripling Byer back to "sing" her poetry at Malaprop's.


Julia Nunnally Duncan writes both poetry and fiction. She has
previously published two collections of stories and a novel, and her
second novel, WHEN DAY IS DONE, is just out from March Street Press.
Her Appalachian poems have appeared in scores of literary journals,
and her first published collection of poetry, AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY
(2007), was named a finalist for the 2008 Roanoke-Chowan Award for
Poetry. She recently completed the manuscript for a second collection
of poems, AT DUSK. Rob Neufeld, book columnist for The Asheville
Citizen-Times, wrote of Julia Nunnally Duncan that she is one of four
Western North Carolina "poets to watch." He remarked that her poems
"make the greatest possible use of line breaks, so that individual
phrases glow like haiku observations. Metaphors develop naturally and
emotionally." In a recent article in North Carolina Literary Review,
Jeffrey Franklin observed of AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY, "Duncan always makes
the place solid, the people real, the situation, in all its emotional
complexity and perilousness, rendered with a deceptive simplicity that
quietly resonates. . . .[Her] people are as recognizably human as any
in Shakespeare[.]" Like our other readers for December 6, Julia
Nunnally Duncan is at once a dedicated writer and an experienced
teacher; she has served as a full-time English instructor at McDowell
Community College for nearly two and a half decades. At Malaprop's,
she will read selections from AN ENDLESS TAPESTRY and from her
manuscript, AT DUSK.

CARPATHIA is Cecilia Woloch's fifth poetry collection. Published in
2009, it went into a second printing about two months after its
official publication date. Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet, has written of CARPATHIA, "The poems . . . are guided by an
exquisite lyricism and heartbreaking emotional honesty. . . . This is
a gorgeous book by a poet who is passionately alive in the world."
Cecilia Woloch has traveled widely and taught just as widely, offering
poetry workshops for children and adults across the United States and
in several locations abroad. She serves as a lecturer in creative
writing at the University of Southern California and is founding
director of the Paris Poetry Workshop. The recipient of numerous
awards for her writing, teaching and theatre work, in 2009 alone,
Cecilia Woloch has been recognized as a finalist in the California
Book Awards of The Commonwealth Club of California for her 2008
chapbook, NARCISSUS; as a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in
Poetry at Nimrod; as the first prize winner of the New Ohio Review
Prize in Poetry; and as a Fellow at the Center for International
Theatre Development/US Artists Initiative in Poland.

Please join us in welcoming three distinguished poets on December 6,
and begin your holiday season with poetry!

Poetrio: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Julia Nunnally Duncan, Celia Woloch
Sunday, December 6, 2009, 3:00 p.m.
Malaprop's Bookstore/Café
55 Haywood Street
Asheville, NC 28801
(828) 254-6734
www.malaprops.com