Great Smokies Writing Program

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For over 25 years, The Great Smokies Writing Program has offered affordable, university-level community classes for writers of all experience levels in Western North Carolina and beyond. The Great Smokies Writing Program is a joint effort between the UNC Asheville departments of Literature and Language, Creative Writing and the Asheville Graduate Center. The program offers opportunities for writer

s of all levels to join a supportive learning community in which their skills and talents can be explored, practiced, and forged under the careful eye of professional writers.

Starting next Tuesday, Jay Aelick's non-credit workshop "Company Worth Keeping: Crafting Compelling Poetic Speakers"! Wh...
09/03/2026

Starting next Tuesday, Jay Aelick's non-credit workshop "Company Worth Keeping: Crafting Compelling Poetic Speakers"!

What makes us want to sit with the speaker of a poem as they turn over ideas, situations, and worries that may seem to have little to do with us? Join this class to investigate compelling poetic speakers and work on crafting your own!

Registration link in the comments.

08/31/2026

TODAY'S THE DAY! 🎊

Registration for this year's NCWN Fall Conference is officially OPEN NOW!

This year's Fall Conference will be held November
6-8 in downtown Asheville. Check-in and classes will take place at Lenoir-Rhyne University Asheville
Center with receptions and discounted room blocks being located nearby at Embassy Suites and DoubleTree Asheville Downtown.

You'll be seeing your old favorites on the schedule
like Master Classes, Manuscript Mart and “Agents & Editors” panel discussions, as well as some new events such as "Affinity Group Meet-Ups,” informal gatherings of writers with commonalities like genre or geography.

The conference will be following a brand-new format and schedule this year, providing attendees more flexibility and lowered costs. NCWN members will be able to register for the full conference for only $199, with partial registration rates available for those who want to attend only one or two days of the conference.

Click the link in our bio or go to ncwriters.org to sign up. We can't wait to see you there! 👏

08/28/2026

Elliot Reed’s last call for his fiction class! Sign up at the link in the comments.

Calling all fiction writers!📣There's still space in Elliot Reed's "Finding Forms in Fiction" class, which starts next We...
08/27/2026

Calling all fiction writers!📣

There's still space in Elliot Reed's "Finding Forms in Fiction" class, which starts next Wednesday. Consider signing up today! If you need financial assistance, don't hesitate to fill out the scholarship application on our website!

Fall instructor spotlight 4!🔎✨Jay Aelick is a nonbinary writer and critic. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State Un...
08/26/2026

Fall instructor spotlight 4!🔎✨

Jay Aelick is a nonbinary writer and critic. They hold an MFA from North Carolina State University and are a former Fulbright Austria Teaching Assistant and fellow of German Literary Institutions: The Berlin Seminar (GLIB). Their work can be found in The Journal, Kestrel, Poetry South, Okay Donkey, International Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Aelick makes up one half of the St. Balasar University English Club Podcast, where real critics at a fake university analyze the internet’s most infamous books.

In Jay's three-session, non-credit workshop, "Company Worth Keeping: Crafting Compelling Poetic Speakers," you'll engage in conversation with the speakers of poems by Henri Cole, Alan Shapiro, and Diane Seuss and develop strategies for crafting speakers passionate about their subject matter, who ponder it from multiple perspectives, and who invite the reader into the tension of the work, making it relevant to their life as well.

Sign up today at the link in the comments!

📣Our Fall classes start as soon as next week!📣 Fiction, comedy as a radical act, ecopoetics, family & community storykee...
08/25/2026

📣Our Fall classes start as soon as next week!📣

Fiction, comedy as a radical act, ecopoetics, family & community storykeeping, the business side of writing... We've got it all!

And don't let finances keep you from signing up—we have a limited number of full scholarships available for NC residents!🎉✨

Find complete information at the link in the comments.

Fall instructor spotlight 3!🔎✨Tim Earley is the author of five collections of poems, including Poems Descriptive of Rura...
08/24/2026

Fall instructor spotlight 3!🔎✨

Tim Earley is the author of five collections of poems, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (Winner of The 2015 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award) and Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal (Delete Press, 2019). Recent work appears in Cold Mountain Review and MiddleLost. A digital chapbook, Rattle Rib, was published by Garden-Door Press in 2025. Tim is also the creator/lead writer of Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse, a tabletop roleplaying game focused on labor conflict and environmental crisis (Pinnacle Entertainment Group, 2023). He is a Lecturer of English at the University of Mississippi.

About his class, "Appalachian Ecopoetics," Tim writes: The term “nature poetry” perhaps conjures up notions of description-laden odes, idealized pastoral scenes, and Romantic pronouncements about the poet’s “oneness” with their surroundings. While there are doubtless sterling examples of these kinds of poems, the tradition of nature writing in Appalachia is far more complex, examining a host of environmental and philosophical issues. In addition to weekly writing prompts and discussions of student poems, we’ll read a variety of Appalachian nature writing and ecopoetic texts.

Sign up today at the link in the comments!

Fall instructor spotlight 2!🔎✨Savannah Brooks earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. She spent the ...
08/20/2026

Fall instructor spotlight 2!🔎✨

Savannah Brooks earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University. She spent the first decade of her career working on literary magazines, at small and hybrid presses, and as a literary agent. In this time, she taught creative writing, publishing, and literature courses at Hamline, the University of Minnesota, and the Loft Literary Center. After contracting a disabling case of long COVID, she relocated to Asheville, NC, where she teaches at the Flatiron Writers Room and the Great Smokies Writing Program and works as a reviewer for The Independent Book Review. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Scuba Diving Magazine, Hobart, and Calyx, among more than a dozen other publications.

About her upcoming class, "Getting Published: Landing Your Work at Literary Magazines, Traditional Houses, & Everything In Between," Savannah writes: Breaking down the publishing landscape into three sectors, this course focuses on the logistics, best approaches, and necessary materials for landing your work at literary and entertainment magazines; small, independent, and university presses; and traditional, hybrid, and self publishers. Each student will leave with drafts of two book reviews, a cover letter, an author bio, a short-form pitch, a short-form submission-ready piece, a query letter and/or long-form proposal, and the first page of a long-form work, all of which can and should be used as templates going forward.

Sign up today at the link in the comments!

Fall instructor spotlight!🔎✨Elliot Reed is the author of the formally inventive novel A Key to Treehouse Living, publish...
08/18/2026

Fall instructor spotlight!🔎✨

Elliot Reed is the author of the formally inventive novel A Key to Treehouse Living, published by Tin House Books. THE Joy Williams calls the book "Disorienting, weirdly wise, indescribably transparent, impossibly recognizable. Fun, too."

Elliot's class, "Finding Forms in Fiction," starts Sept. 2. About the class, he says "Weekly exercises and prompts will reduce writing anxiety and build an atmosphere of creativity in the workshop space. Course material will help us read through the 'ephemeralist' lens. We will find ephemera and write ephemera to take the pressure off of the product."

Don't wait! Sign up today at the link in the comments!

Address

1 University Hts
Asheville, NC
28804

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+18282516420

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