Carolina Mountains Literary Festival 2025

In response to the challenges our region has faced in the wake of Hurricane Helene, the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival is offering a special one-day mini-festival this fall—designed not only to keep our literary spirit alive, but to raise critical funds for a full festival return in 2026. While this year's gathering is smaller in scale, it’s rich in heart and purpose, spotlighting powerful voices and bringing our community together in support of the festival’s future. Join us on Saturday, September 6, for a keynote author talk with beloved Southern writer Margaret Renkl, a poetry workshop with acclaimed poet Nickole Brown, and our always-popular Book Buzz celebration at Plott Hound Books. Your participation helps us rebuild—and ensures the stories continue.

Margaret Renkl is the author of Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019) and Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (2021), and The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, (2023), which won the 2024 Southern Book Prize. Her next book, Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal (October 2024), is a companion to The Comfort of Crows that offers 52 writing prompts and plentiful advice for studying the natural world. Renkl is contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear each Monday. A graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.

Nickole Brown received an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Currently she edits the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press, teaches each fall at the Great Smokies Writing Program. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her wife, the poet Jessica Jacobs.

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