Tickets $18 / Member discount varies by tier.
Members apply your code at check out for discount!
Doors at 7pm | Show 7:30pm
Story Parlor | 227 Haywood Road
Parking & Policies
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages available for purchase. All shows, unless specified, are ages 16+.
Juniper Bends, a quarterly reading series curated by Locke Hunter and Alli Marshall, features poetry, prose, and music from established and emerging writers and artists.
Featuring…. Megan Lucas (fiction), Alex McWalters (fiction), Ramin Gillet (poetry), Jason Smith (music), and Ashe Walker (nonfiction).
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Meagan Lucas is the author of the Anthony-nominated short story collection Here in the Dark and the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs. Her short fiction has been named to The Best American Mystery and Suspense Distinguished list twice (2023, 2024) and her story “They Light Themselves on Fire” will be included in the 2025 edition. Meagan teaches in the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina – Asheville, is the editor-in-chief of Reckon Review, and studies law at the University of Dayton. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in Flat Rock with her husband and children.
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Alex McWalters is a writer, musician and educator based in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays percussion for River Whyless, and holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson. He has served as the Warren Wilson MFA Residency Fellow since 2020 and serves on the board of Punch Bucket Lit, an Asheville literary nonprofit. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Nimrod International, North Carolina Literary Review, Dogwood Journal, No Depression, Paste Magazine and has been named a finalist for the James Hurst Fiction Prize, The Dogwood Fiction Prize, and the NCLR Doris Betts Fiction Prize.
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Ramin Gillette’s first poetry collection, Us and Them, is an exploration of the illusions of race, national sovereignty, and identities that we tenaciously hold on to and that shackle our feet to a boat that is quickly sinking. As someone who grew up in Cameroon and was raised by an Iraqi/Iranian mother and American father, Gillette has learned to appreciate and embrace humanity’s inherent oneness. He now lives and writes in the Appalachian Mountains.
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Writer, animist, ritualist. Ashe Walker is inspired by the natural world, her work pursuing interconnectedness and celebrating the sublime Western North Carolina mountains and the spirit of rural Appalachia. Through classes and participation at Story Parlor and Great Smokies Writing Program she is making a return to her first love, words on paper. When she is not writing she can be found communing with the wild alongside her wolf dog and husband, foraging, stirring a pot or in her studio designing intention-centered jewelry for her company, Righteous Rosey.
*Our musical guest is Jason Smith, a musician and songwriter from Asheville. He formed Night's Bright Colors and the ambient side project, Isolation Studies in 2003. He also writes music for film and theater.
About Juniper Bends | Launched in 2009, Juniper Bends ran for 10 years before taking a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Juniper nurtures the voices of new writers while providing a space for local established writers to showcase their work.