Join Long-running Juniper Bends Reading Series for our second reading of the 2026 season!
Our Summer theme is “A Midsummer Night's Feast”
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.
This volume features:
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Zackary Vernon is a writer and scholar based in Boone, North Carolina, where he is a Professor of English at Appalachian State University.
His work has appeared in a range of magazines and journals, including The Bitter Southerner, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Cultures, and he has received both the Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Randall Kenan Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review.
He is the author of the YA novel Our Bodies Electric (2024) and the nonfiction book Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World (2026).
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Soham is the author of The Daughter Industry (Nightboat, 2026), as well as all one in the end/water—(2022), ever really hear it (2018), winner of the Subito Prize, and to afar from afar (2018). They live in Blacksburg, Virginia where they teach at the MFA at Virginia Tech.
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Pulling from a well of folk- rock, soul, and jazz inspiration Lillie has formed a genre bending artistry and writing style deeply and uniquely her own. With a voice often likened to Norah Jones, Bonnie Raitt and Brandi Carlile, Lillie sings to the fullness that is being alive with a razor sharp focus on the heart of each person in the room with her.
Lillie has just released her self produced sophomore album Big New Heart and lives in Blue Ridge mountains of Asheville, NC.
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Susanne’s latest book is The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, Nazi Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Hurts Us Now. She is also the author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Make Me a Mother, Entangled Objects, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her awards include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, an Amazon Best Memoir of the Year award, and others.
Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., Slate, The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, and The New Republic and have been featured on CNN as well as the CBC Ideas documentary series. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Lexi Kessens (she/her) is a fiction writer from East Tennessee and a current MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, where she teaches First-Year Writing and edits The New River Journal.
Her work focuses on Southern experiences and personal journeys, often featuring characters who feel like they’re “out of the loop.” She is interested in combining fiction with creative nonfiction and poetic forms. You can find her work somewhere on her laptop.