Join Long-running Juniper Bends Reading Series for our first reading of the 2026 season!
Our spring theme is “Out Like a Lion: Finding Power and Voice in the Season of Rebirth”
This month features:
Poet Mackenzie Kozak
Writer and artist Marsha Almodovar
Novelist, poet, essayist and publisher Barbara Roether
Fiction writer and editor Thomas Calder
Singer-songwriter Thomas Kozak
curated by Locke Hunter and Brit Washburn
About Juniper Bends | Juniper Bends has been a beloved Asheville reading series for 15 years! The series nurtures the voices of new and emerging writers and creatives while providing a space for local established writers to showcase their work.
Books will be available for purchase, and the authors will sign them. Artwork will also be available to purchase from Marsha.
Students can attend for free with proof of current student ID, but MUST RSVP at the above ticketing link.
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Mackenzie Kozak is the author of no swaddle (University of Iowa Press, 2025), selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Mackenzie serves as an associate editor at Orison Books and works as a grief therapist in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Marsha Almodovar is a mixed-media painter and Writer. whose work passionately explores themes like social justice, bodily autonomy, healing generational trauma, and embodiment.
Her expressive style draws on bright colors, emotion, natural elements, and personal narrative—she often centers her art around reclaiming the narrative of the body and challenging conventional portrayals of nudity and femininity.
Marsha also has written, illustrated and published a bilingual children's book called Mucho Mucho.
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Barbara Roether is the publisher at Wet Cement Press and sometimes teaches at the Great Smokies Writing program.
She is currently writing about Buddhist education for Tricycle Magazine. Her second novel Free Girls is coming out later in 2026.
Her first novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To (McPherson & Co. 2015) was winner of an Independent Press Award, and the IndieFab Book of the year.
Additional work includes two poetry collections Saraswati’s Lament and The Middle Atlas, as well as essays and reviews in Lost Magazine,Rain Taxi, Blaze Vox, the Kyoto Journal and elsewhere. Her essay "Strangers in the Same Land" was chosen as the 2026 third-place winner in the Rose Post contest with North Carolina Writers Network.
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Thomas Calder is the author of The Wind Under the Door and the forthcoming novel, The Crave (Regal House Publishing, 2028). He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston.
His work has appeared in Juked, Gulf Coast, West Branch, and elsewhere.
He is also a regular contributor to storySouth. His short fiction was a semifinalist for the 2025 Doris Betts Fiction Prize and his forthcoming novel, The Crave, was a finalist for the 2025 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. Along with writing fiction, he is the managing editor of Mountain Xpress, an alt-weekly in Asheville, and the co-host of DRAFT: Artistry in Conversation with fellow author Tessa Fontaine. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and daughter.
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A storyteller from Alabama, Thomas Kozak weaves mythology, spirituality, and poetry into his songs and delivers them with a dark voice and rhythmic finger-picking. His latest EP, “Our Lady of Embers,” tells the story of divining a thread of hope across these southern mountains.