An Evening of Spoken Word and Music. Memory resides in the music of words and sounds. Come, enjoy a night for recapturing what is never lost if it resides in our hearts.
Bruce Spang will launch his two new books:
No Way Back: A Young Man's Search for Home — A memoir
Dear Teen, Dear Poet: A Coming of Age in Letters — A book of letters to a young man.
He will be joined by John Himmelheber and friends, who will provide music along with readings of original work by Sebastian Matthews, Luke Haskins, and R Lyon Bergh.
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, has published five books of poems, including Twist (2025), All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, To the Promised Land Grocery, and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and chapbooks.
He is also the author of two novels, The River Crossed (2024), and The Deception of the Thrush, and a memoir, Those Close Beside Me: A Young Man’s Search for Home. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine and staff writer for The Asheville Poetry Review.
His poems have been published in Connecticut River Review, Puckerbrush Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Café Review and other journals across the United States.
He teaches courses in fiction and poetry at Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina in Asheville and lives in Candler, North Carolina with his husband Myles Rightmire and their three dogs, five fish, and eighteen birds.
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Sebastian lives with his family in Asheville, NC. He teaches for the Great Smokies Writing Program.
He is the author of a memoir, two books of poems, a hybrid collection of poetry and prose, a collage novel, and, most recently, The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces.
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Luke Hankins is the author of several poetry collections, including MAGNITUDE: New & Selected Short Poems (Texas Review Press, forthcoming in 2027).
He has edited or co-edited several anthologies, most recently Breaking into Blossom: Poems with Extraordinary Endings (with Nomi Stone; Texas Review Press, 2026). He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives, and he directs UNC Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program.
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Artistic, Autistic, Optimistic, & Intuitive.
A creative writer and performer since the elementary years, Lyon has formed a life-long love for the interplay between artist and audience, and the conversation that occurs in that connection; they ask what it is to be alive and to be human.
Their work is told in the dark, drenched in magical realism, and centered around themes of transformation, the Feminine & Masculine, queer identity, and the autistic perspective.
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John DuPree (keyboard)
John Himmelheber (bass guitar)
Todd Seeleman (lead/rhythm guitar)
Rich Schnappauf (lead/rhythm guitar)
The Sonic Boomers (aka The Ashkickers) blast out classic vinyl rock music. The band formed over the last fifteen years from a set of baby-boomers who started rockin' in their teens and twenties and haven't stopped yet.
