Featured painting: Caterwaul; Oil and Watercolor on Linen; 80" x 64"; 2021 by Hannah Barnes

To be a poet, to my mind, is to be aware, as I once read in a children’s book about the five senses: to ‘see all there is to see, hear all there is to hear, smell all there is to smell, taste all there is to taste, touch all there is to touch.’ To pay attention; to be curious and alert; to be receptive and reflective, reverent and irreverent, romantic and skeptical; to mourn and to praise; to contemplate, celebrate, and salvage what we can of the universe, on behalf of our species. To be a poet, then, is no more or less than to be fully human and to translate and distill that experience into language so meticulously as to evoke and redeem something of life itself.

—from “The Edge: Of Motherhood and Poetics,” Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose

Upcoming Events and Readings

Saturday, April 5th, 2025, 10:00AM Collegeville Institute Popup Writing Workshop

Thursday, April 17, 2025, 7PM Blacksburg Books, Blacksburg, VA

Sunday, May 4, 2025, 4:30PM Malaprop's Books, Asheville, NC

Past Events:

Saturday, September 21, 2024 Punch Bucket Lit Festival, Asheville, NC

10:00 AM to 11:15 AM Panel: “Literary Citizenship: Engaging Communities with Luke Hankins, Delicia Daniels, Barbara Roether, and Christian Detisch (Renaissance Hotel - Ballroom C2)

4:00 PM to 5:15 PM Wet Cement Reading with Thoreau Lovell, Chengru He, Barbara Roether, Tony-Wallin Sato, Susan M. Shultz, (Renaissance Hotel -Ballroom C2)

Sunday, September 10, 2023 at 5:00 Word Play Radio, Asheville FM, 103.3

Thursday, September 14, 2023 at 7:00PM Jazz Hybrid Presents an Evening of Poetry & Music. Story Parlor, 227 Haywood Road, West Asheville.

Sunday, September 17, 2023, 7:00PM Poetry as Consolation wsg Brit Washburn. An online workshop and discussion. Sliding scale.

Thursday, October 5, 2023, 6:30PM Juniper Bends Reading Series, Citizen Vinyl, 14 O'Henry Ave., Asheville

Sunday, October 15, 2023 5:00PM Writers at Home, Malaprop’s Bookstore, Asheville

Friday, November 17, Story Parlor