Full Schedule with Descriptions

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6

At Lenoir-Rhyne Asheville Center
3:00–6:00 p.m.: Check-In Open

At DoubleTree Asheville Downtown
6:00 p.m.: Opening Reception

6:30–7:30 p.m.: Faculty Readings
Sponsored by Blair

At Various Sites
7:30 p.m–whenever: Caucuses & Affinity Groups Off-Site Meet-Ups
Your chance to meet and get to know writers who share something in common: genre, geography, goals, or more.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7

At Lenoir-Rhyne Asheville Center
8:00–9:00 a.m.: Morning Pages Prompt Party
Get your creative juices flowing with a few prompts to start your day.

8:00–9:00 a.m.: Open Mic Readings

9:00–10:30 a.m.: SESSION I
Grabbing the Reader by the Throat with Mark Powell
The late Pat Conroy talked of the necessity of “grabbing the reader by the throat” from the very start. Looking at examples that range from Emma Cline to Atticus Lish, we will discuss what makes for a powerful opening that hooks a reader. Participants should bring the first 150 words of a current work-in-progress.

Breaking into Blossom: Approaches to Poetic Endings with Luke Hankins
In this session based on my anthology Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings, we’ll examine a wide range of modern and contemporary approaches to poetic closure/non-closure. We’ll consider formal and aesthetic effects including wholeness, pleasure, universalism, subjectivity, resistance, surprise, and bewilderment, as exemplified in the architectures of poems. Participants can expect to take away ideas that will inform their own poetic composition.

What’s Working in Author Marketing (And What Not to Waste Your Time On) with Catherine Campbell (FULL)
Whether you’re a debut novelist or a seasoned author with a backlist, you don’t need a huge marketing budget or team to grow your author presence. You just need some time, self-awareness, and a plan that fits who you are. In this session, marketing expert Catherine Campbell will lead you through an overview of what’s working for authors today, what’s outdated, what’s a waste of money, and what “rules” you can ignore. We’ll then put pen to paper and use guided prompts to sketch out quick, individualized marketing plans. You will start or revisit your author presence while getting a clear picture of what you are able to do based on your time, money, interests, personal values, and technical skills. There will be no small talk or lengthy intros at the beginning of this session—we’re going to leverage every minute for you. Come to class ready to dive in.

Mastering Genre: Writing Beyond the Trope with Van Jensen
A car explodes. Aliens invade. An ominous silhouette appears behind an unaware hero. Genre fiction is full of fun, thrilling moments. But what is it that separates run-of-the-mill genre stories from ones that stick with readers and build an audience for the author? In this class, we’ll explore some key ways that writers can elevate their genre fiction through bringing new life to tired tropes, developing unexpected worlds, and, most importantly, keeping a keen eye on characters and their emotional journeys.

CNF Master Class: Writing Narrative Nonfiction: Conceive, Research, Shape, and Sell with Denise Kiernan (FULL)
In this class we will explore methods to carry a nonfiction book idea from conception to the creation of a book proposal—the critical sales document typically used to tempt traditional publishers to buy your book. Along the way, we’ll discuss how to assess an idea, how to conduct research (including some of my favorite sources and research destinations), how to assemble and organize materials, and whether to pursue a traditional or self-publishing route.

Please submit up to 1,500 sequential words from a single work, along with your current CV in a separate attachment, on the same day that you register for the conference. Submissions should be saved in an MS Word document, using double-spaced 12-point Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, with numbered pages, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and the title of the work and your name should appear on the submission itself. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.

Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.

Fiction Master Class: The Feel of a Place with Tommy Hays (FULL)
In Richard Russo’s seminal essay “Location, Location, Location:”, he writes, “In the end, the only compelling reason to pay more attention to place, to exterior setting, is the belief, the faith, that place and its people are intertwined, that place is character, and that to know the rhythms, the textures, the feel of a place is to know more deeply and truly its people.” We fiction writers often undervalue or overlook the importance of place in our work, especially our own landscapes, the landscapes of our lives. For various reasons, we avoid writing out of them and by doing so, cut ourselves off from some of our own best sources. In this class we’ll read each other’s work closely in terms of craft, and one lens we’ll examine it through will be place, not as obligatory backdrop, but as character revelation through embodied emotional terrain.

Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.

Poetry Master Class: Unbeautiful Animals with Raye Hendrix
Why does it bother us to kill a butterfly, but not a spider? Why are we (as a species) comfortable eating pigs, cows, and chickens, but not cats and dogs? These aren’t new questions, but they’re worth investigating, especially as poets. In this generative workshop, I want to push our poems to examine the aesthetics of morality, not just for literal animals (though we may start there), but for ourselves, our choices, the unbeautiful animals we are. The poetic line complicates, and in this class, rather than reaching for poetic perfection, like birth, I want us to lean into the mess of creation. Bring your spiders, your hairy toes, your sins (real or imagined). Let us find the strange, imperfect beauty that may be lurking there, too.

Please submit three poems, totaling no more than five pages, on the same day that you register for the conference, along with your current CV in a separate attachment. Poems should be saved in a single MS Word document, using single-spaced, 12-point, Arial, Calibri, or Times New Roman font, and sent as an attachment to masterclass@ncwriters.org. The Word document’s file name should include your own last name, and your name and the title of each poem should appear on the submission. If accepted into the Master Class, your submitted work will be shared with other Master Class registrants.

Each registrant should be ready to handle the intensive instruction and atmosphere of the Master Class.

Manuscript Mart with Justin Brouckaert, Lydia Caudill (FULL), Kate McKean, or Elizabeth Pratt (FULL)

10:30–11:00 a.m.: Break

11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: SESSION II

Crafting Voice and Point of View with Alice Martin (FULL)
Can’t quite find your character’s voice? Trying to determine which point of view would be best for the story you’re telling? Writing a story with multiple POVs that you need to juggle? Stories are defined by who (or what) is telling them. In this session, we will explore the benefits and challenges of different kinds of perspectives and build a toolkit for how to develop distinct and effective voices for your characters. We’ll start by cracking open the hood of how other writers created memorable and genuine voices in their fiction and nonfiction texts. Then, we’ll take the lessons we learned from them to start finding our own characters’ voices through some collaborative writing exercises. Finally, we’ll weigh the possibilities and limitations of a variety of POV choices and discuss how to select a perspective (or multiple perspectives) to serve your individual story. Whether you have a voice-y narrator you can’t quite seem to keep consistent, need help with differentiating the voices of multiple POV narrators, or are just starting to conceptualize which point of view you want to tell your story in, this session will provide a series of tips, examples, and exercises to help move you forward.

Truth and Beauty: Finding Meaning in Experience with Poem-Making with Laura Hope-Gill
We know the words: “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” This famous binary lies at the heart of the creative process. We bring what is, and our poetry shows us the meaning or the resolution or the insight. It’s natural intelligence, and it guides us through life while dosing us with oxytocin, aka love itself. In this workshop, we will use life experience as “truth” and the poetic riffing it inspires as “beauty.” Come entirely unprepared or with drafts you’ve been wanting to develop, and I will model for you an entirely liberating, self-regenerating, and astonishing method for not only making beautiful poems but for engaging life and world like a true Romantic, which as we learn more and more about the quantum world, is now true realism.

Creating Audio Dramas with Jamieson Ridenhour
Over the past ten or fifteen years, audio drama has experienced explosive growth in the podcasting world. Creating audio drama is rewarding as well as challenging, pulling elements of fiction writing, script-writing, and sound design together to make a unique experience. This talk by the creator of the popular audio drama Palimpsest will walk through the process of creating audio drama, including production tools and processes, using Palimpsest as a case study.

Writing for the YA Audience: Crafting Engaging Stories for Teens & Young Adults with F. T. Lukens
It is a truth universally acknowledged by both educators and parents that the average teenage attention span is not the longest. Additionally, in this world of binge watching, doom scrolling, and thirty-second dopamine hits via short-form videos, authors have found their books vying for their audience’s attention amid a plethora of other easily accessible media. So how can we compete? In this class, we’ll discuss different methods of writing for the unique audience that is today’s teens and young adults and how to craft engaging stories that will hold their attention.

CNF Master Class with Denise Kiernan (cont.)

Fiction Master Class with Tommy Hays (cont.)

Poetry Master Class with Raye Hendrix (cont.)

Manuscript Mart

12:30 – 2 p.m.: MIDDAY BREAK
Lunch options abound in all directions, only a short walk or short drive away.

2 – 3 p.m.: All Stories Connect panel discussion: Thirty Years of the Asheville Poetry Review
Sponsored by the Great Smokies Writing Program
Asheville Poetry Review was an annual literary journal, founded in 1994 by Keith Flynn, that published 180–250 pages of poems, interviews, translations, essays, historical perspectives, and book reviews. During its lifetime, Asheville Poetry Review published more than 1900 new and established writers from 22 different countries, including Robert Bly, Patricia Smith, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joy Harjo, Gary Snyder, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Hayden Carruth, Ai, Marilyn Hacker, Yusef Komunyakaa, Eavan Boland, R. S. Thomas, A. E. Stallings, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Fred Chappell, Dorianne Laux, David Kirby, Marilyn Nelson, Diane Seuss, Robert Morgan, Quincy Troupe, Sherman Alexie, Marvin Bell, Michael Harper, Ciaran Carson, B. H. Fairchild, Carl Phillips, and Colette Inez. From its first regional issue, Asheville Poetry Review grew into an international publication with distribution across the US, Canada, and Europe. This panel will explore how APR both found and created a worldwide literary community.

3 – 4 :30 p.m.: SESSION III

Little Experiences: What Childhood Teaches Us About Fiction with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips (FULL)
In her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor wrote: “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.” This class is dedicated to little experiences from your childhood. Through memory based exercises, inspired by the writer/artist Joe Brainard and cartoonist Lynda Barry, we’ll discover, as Barry describes it:“At the center of everything we call ‘the arts,’ and children call ‘play,’ is something which seems somehow alive.” While this class will be led through a short fiction lens, writers of all genres should join the fun. Important: A physical notebook is needed for participation.

How to Skip the Line at the DMV and Issue Your Own Creative License: A Poetry Workshop with Clint Bowman
In this workshop, we’ll talk about the unconventional ways that a writer can learn how to write and make a living. While waiting in line for the DMV (MFA) may work for some, it’s not the only path to being a published writer. In this workshop, we will not be writing on the spot or doing any ice breaker activities. Instead, we’ll be discussing some tips and tricks to broaden your creative horizon without going into debt.

Writing a Query Letter and Finding the Right Agent with Alice Martin
In this hands-on session, you will learn how to pitch your novel to literary agents, how to write a query letter that is both eye-catching and appropriate, and how to make a savvy submission list of agents for your book project. We’ll start by identifying and defining the component parts of agent query letters by close reading examples together. Next, we’ll help each other brainstorm pitch potential hooks and comparable titles for our projects-in-progress. Finally, we’ll discuss strategies for finding the right potential agents for your project and begin to build our own submission lists. Whether you have a query letter drafted or aren’t completely sure yet what a query letter (or agent) is, this class is open to all interested in finding a supportive community during the trying process of seeking book publication!

The Character of Horror with Jamieson Ridenhour
Horror—whether psychological, Gothic, slasher, cosmic, or creature feature—is effective in direct proportion to how high the stakes are for your characters. This class will discuss the character-driven nature of horror, using examples of complex and unreliable characters from a range of dark classics as well as contemporary authors and film. You’ll also be given prompts on developing character backstory and psychology to amplify reader investment, and thus their fear.

CNF Master Class with Denise Kiernan (cont.)

Fiction Master Class with Tommy Hays (cont.)

Poetry Master Class with Raye Hendrix (cont.)

Manuscript Mart

4:30–5:30 p.m.: Break

At Embassy Suites Asheville Downtown
5:30–6:30 p.m.: Keynote Reception

6:00–7:00 p.m.: Faculty Readings

7:00–7:30 p.m.: Keynote Address by Denise Kiernan
Denise Kiernan is an author, journalist, producer, and host of “CRAFT: Authors in Conversation.” Her forthcoming narrative nonfiction title, Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution arrives June 23, 2026. Her latest young reader’s book, We Gather Together: Stories of Thanksgiving from then to now, is a companion title to the popular adult nonfiction book, We Gather Together, and children’s picture book, Giving Thanks. Her book The Last Castle was an instant New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback and was also a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is also the author of The Girls of Atomic City, which is a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR bestseller and has been published in multiple languages. She lives in North Carolina.

7:30–8:00 p.m.: Keynote Book Signing & Reception
Sponsored by Palimpsest Productions

At Various Sites
8:00 p.m.: Affinity Group Off-Site Meet-Ups

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 8

All events at Lenoir-Rhyne Asheville Center
8:00–9:00 a.m.: Agents & Editors panel discussion
Your chance to get real-time answers from real-life agents and editors.

9:00–10:30 a.m.: SESSION IV

That’s What She Said: The Art of Dialogue with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Participants will examine the various choices made in fictional dialogue design that affect rhythm, character development, and plot trajectory. This class will focus on methods for incorporating direct speech into scenes through a series of directed prompts and discussion.

Writing Ambivalence with Mackenzie Kozak
As writers, we may often turn to the page for clarity and precision, to distill experience in a way that leads to understanding. But what does it look like to write when we are in the midst of contradiction, of duality, of indecision? How can we attempt to be precise about an imprecise state? In this workshop, we will examine poems that wrestle with ambivalence, and then we will take some time to write and reflect upon our own ambivalences.

Publishing as Collective Practice: Understanding the Literary Ecosystem and Finding Your Place in It with Andrew Mack
Publishing is often framed as something that happens to writers. This class reframes it as something writers actively build together. Drawing on his experience founding Loblolly Press, Andrew Mack walks participants through the four pillars of collective publishing and helps writers at every level map their own literary community—the people, places, and platforms that sustain a writing life. Expect honest conversation about how indie publishing actually works from the inside, and leave with a clearer picture of where you already belong and where you want to go next.

Writing from Our Personal Mythology with Erin Hallagan Clare (FULL)
Writers carry a rich internal archive of lived, inherited, and imagined stories that shape their creative work. This 90-minute session explores how to identify recurring themes, images, and emotional patterns as elements of personal mythology, and how to use them as generative material for writing. Through guided prompts and exercises, participants will work with memory, symbolic resonance, and archetypal structure to identify new material for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid forms.

Manuscript Mart

10:45–11:15 a.m.: Open Mic Readings

11:30 a.m.– 1:00 p.m.: SESSION V

The Arrangement: How Structures in Music and Storytelling Spark Creativity with Nic Brown (FULL)
Music is an abstract art form in many ways. How and why does it function? Hard to say exactly, but as a drummer I have spent years thinking about the ways in which the arrangement of sound—often within familiar structures—positions a listener to respond both viscerally and emotionally. Writing operates in many of the same ways, working within form and structure to help the reader connect. As both a drummer and a writer, I often think about these similarities and the ways in which an awareness of structure helps me create. I’ll talk about artistic parameters, arrangements of music and story, and what a career as a musician and writer actually looks like.

An Artist’s Duty with NitaJade
This generative workshop will honor Nina Simone and her famous quote, “an artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” We’ll explore and create personal/confessional poetry, climate-based time-capsule poetry, sociopolitical poetry, and/or community-centered inspirational poetry.

Conversations Across Disciplines: What Artists Can Learn from One Another with Thomas Calder and Tessa Fontaine
Tessa Fontaine and Thomas Calder first met at a reading event in West Asheville. Many other people in the audience were writers as well. Several years later, when the pair decided to launch their own event, they wanted to try something that went beyond the literary community—inviting artists from various mediums to come together to discuss where creative process overlaps and what we can glean from each other’s approaches to any given project. What might a poet come to understand about obsession from a conductor? How does the audience reaction a comic is tracking inform a novelist? Since launching DRAFT: Artistry in Conversation in February 2026, the duo has led discussions with a variety of artists—from chefs to musicians to comedians to painters—while always including one writer in the mix. The gatherings have been a great way to expose audiences to new mediums, and for everyone involved to interrogate the common traits that exist across forms, and borrow ideas from one discipline to another.

Uncanny Language: Crafting Voice-Driven Horror with Taylor Sykes (FULL)
There are many techniques writers can employ to unsettle and disquiet the reader. In this craft class, we’ll discuss how the language can be harnessed to create tension and hair-raising atmosphere. Examining a spectrum of both classic and contemporary works of horror, combined with a range of writing prompts, we will explore the stylistic techniques utilized in narration, dialogue, and description that help emphasize the sensation of fear, leaving the reader haunted long after the last page. As a disclaimer, the class will avoid excessively violent depictions or imagery, staying away from gore for gore’s sake. This class is suited for writers of literary horror, as well as any writer looking to enhance the intensity and foreboding in their prose.

Manuscript Mart

1:00 p.m.: Conference Goes into Recess
The words go on forever, and the writing never ends.