UNC Asheville Department of English

04/19/2024

UNC Asheville English Majors and Alumni, please fill out this brief three-question survey on your experience with UNC Asheville's general education program, the Liberal Arts Core (since 2015).

Access Google Forms with a personal Google account or Google Workspace account (for business use).

04/17/2024

It's Giving Day at UNC Asheville. We would appreciate a small donation to our student-run literary arts magazine, especially considering the duress we are experiencing with our budget deficit. The students do great work here, and we now run a concurrent Headwaters course led by Dr. Evan Gurney that teaches students the ins and outs of operating such a publication, providing them with an experiential, professional learning experience. We appreciate the work our students do and your generous support.

02/08/2024

Blind Date with a Banned Book
February 23 at 6 PM
Highsmith Student Life Porch

Come find your perfect match and learn about censorship of literature in the classroom. Books will be kept anonymous so students can grab them blindly.

Light refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by SNCAE, the Department of Education, and the Department of English.

03/08/2022

Asheville, this...
UNC Asheville UNC Asheville Alumni Association UNC Asheville Department of English

02/11/2022

UNCA Writer-in-Residence Wiley Cash will be in conversation with alumna Mesha Maren on Tuesday, Feb. 15 at 7:00 p.m. to celebrate the release of her new novel, Perpetual West. This event is sponsored by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, which represents around 700 independently owned bookstores across the southeast. The link to register is https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mQCeuocDTEGyX4-GpQuz9g. We hope you join us for this special creative writing alumni-focused event!

One thing that continually shows up in my writing is the question of identity and place and the kind of reciprocal relationship between them.

01/27/2022

Please join us in congratulating Diamond Forde, our pre-doctoral fellow for faculty diversity in the English department, on receipt of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and publication in Obsidian. She will be reading from her work virtually on Friday, 1/28 at 7pm. Event details are online at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/obsidianvoices-spring-2022-tickets-244141091577.

Congratulations, Diamond!

11/29/2021

Many Small Disasters, a new novella by our own Taylor Sykes, has been published by Los Galesburg press. It is available to purchase at https://www.losgalesburg.com/purchase-1/gb5htla9alqb39e3fwo5rcc2jgty7e

ABOUT MANY SMALL DISASTERS
Rebecca is an aspiring but uninspired writer living in Brooklyn. Struggling with creative stagnancy and the lingering loss of an old relationship, Rebecca drifts through the fog of her day to day while watching her friend Janelle succeed and stay in love in the city. When her Crown Heights apartment is infested with bed bugs, Rebecca’s fragile psyche spirals toward breakdown, and distinctions between nightmare and reality are blurred. A young woman’s reckoning with friendship, s*x, art, and independence, Many Small Disasters hinges on Rebecca’s acknowledgement of past mistakes in order to reclaim control over her disastrous present.

Many Small Disasters by Taylor Sykes

10/12/2021

The Writers at Home reading series features work from UNCA’s Great Smokies Writing Program and The Great Smokies Review. September's event is canceled, but Writers at Home will resume in October. 

10/05/2021

Wiley Cash: "It was a lot of fun talking to Miwa Messer of Barnes & Noble on the Poured Over podcast. While we discuss my new novel When Ghosts Come Home, we spent a lot of time talking about my work in the classroom at UNC Asheville, and it was an honor to give a shoutout to current and former students, Carrel Barber and Damien Holland, who are Barnes & Noble booksellers here in Asheville."

"You never know what’s going to happen in a bookstore.” Wiley Cash joins us on the show to talk about the story about a too-big aircraft and a too-short runway that inspired his new novel, When Ghosts Come Home; tell us why he had to set the book in the 1980s; and how excited he is by the curren...