News & Events

Spring Issue of "The Great Smokies Review" Now Online; Authors Offer Public Reading May 15

March 31, 2011

The Spring 2011 issue of The Great Smokies Review, a Web-based literary magazine published by UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program (GSWP), is now online at thegreatsmokiesreview.org.

The Great Smokies Review features creative works and reflections on the craft of writing by past and present students and faculty of the GSWP, which has just celebrated 10 years of bringing quality writing workshops to the Western North Carolina community.

This fourth issue of The Great Smokies Review begins with Editor Elizabeth Lutyens' musings on writing about place, and then takes readers to locales familiar and strange. The literary journey winds through the one-lane Carolina roads of GSWP Executive Director Tommy Hays' boyhood, and then makes stops in the North Slope of Alaska, Sichuan, China, and colonial-era Massachusetts. Readers will view the Cretaceous Period through the eyes of a hasty time-traveler, and visit a suburban house that a grieving mother refuses to leave.

Many different styles – nonfiction, short stories, novel excerpts and poetry – are represented. This issue also includes an interview by Nancy Russell-Forsythe with popular novelist and GSWP instructor Vicki Lane; musings by regular Review contributor Pam Ruatto and UNC Asheville Intern Brian Hart; and a craft session by GSWP poetry instructor Katherine Soniat.

The Review, like the Great Smokies Writing Program, brings together writers and readers of many different levels of experience. “We are growing new layers within the creative writing community," says Hays. "The Great Smokies Review is a forum for discussion and learning as well as a place for good work.”

Contributors from the Fall and Spring issues will present a reading of their works, as part of the Writers at Home series, 3 p.m. Sunday, May 15, at Malaprop’s Book Store/Café, 55 Haywood St., downtown Asheville. The reading is free and open to the public.

For more information, about the Great Smokies Writing Program, contact Tommy Hays at 828.254.1389.