IN PERSON TICKETS ARE NOW SOLD OUT!
Doors at 7pm | Show at 7:30pm
Parking & Policies
The holidays, despite their bright lights and jolly jingles, can be a difficult time for many who have suffered loss in their lives. Join Story Parlor for an evening of stories, music, and performance about finding good in the grief, joy in the world, and hope for the holidays.
VIRTUAL TICKETS
Doors + Streaming Begins at 7pm ET | Show at 7:30pm ET
Friday, December 9
Tickets | Pay what you can! All ticket sales go to support our volunteer-run organization in the effort to provide an inclusive and accessible community arts space, while also (always!) compensating our participating performers.
All virtual ticket sales are final.
CALL FOR PRE-SHOW SUBMISSIONS!
Do you have a grief story that can be told with a photograph and short caption? Please send it to us to be considered for our pre-show slideshow.
Email: erin@storyparloravl.com
Include: Photo and caption (not to exceed 150 words).
Artist Line-up Includes…
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Morgan Bost is a local comic and cohost of “The Hot Seat,” a weekly comedy open mic/silly talk show Tuesdays at 7:00 at UpCountry Brewing. Her monthly humor column, “Best Medicine with Morgan Bost,” can be found in the last issue of every month of the Mountain Xpress. Her interests include comedy, cats, and crying. She’s opened for Rob Delaney and has appeared in several breweries and discount grocery stores across Western North Carolina.
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All Around Artsy was founded in 2009 by Kira Bursky, an award-winning filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist. She is inspired by her personal journey with mental health and is driven to tell stories of our ability to transform our minds and hearts into a perspective of infinite possibility. She has produced over 60 short films and music videos that have screened at festivals around the world from Los Angeles to Berlin to Beijing. In 2014 Kira was recognized as National YoungArts Finalist and was a finalist in the White House Student Film Festival where she had the honor of screening her work in the White House. In 2015 Kira was selected as the Best Emerging Female Filmmaker at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY). In 2016 she was featured in Seventeen Magazine as the April issue's Power Girl and received the Emerging Artist to Watch grant through Le Couvent artist residency in France. Kira and her creations have been featured through NPR, Out Magazine, Pride and No Film School. Her YouTube channel has over 42,000+ subscribers and 16 million+ views. In November 2019 she created and launched an immersive film installation entitled "Considerations of Infinity," as a part of a year-long artist residency in Asheville, NC. In 2021, Kira dove headfirst into her passion of visual art. Since then, Kira has sold over 2,500 editions of her artwork as NFTs. Her mental health celebrating NFT collection "Magic Mind" recently donated $10,000 in cryptocurrency to mental health organizations.
Website: https://www.allaroundartsy.com/
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Lauded by UK music reviewer Three Chords and the Truth as sounding like she was “…born to gypsy poets and raised in the mountains by Emmylou Harris,” Asheville, North Carolina songstress Jane Kramer has garnered international recognition for the sultry, heartrending originality of her vocals and for the heavy-hitting lyrical eloquence of her songwriting.
With deep roots in the musical traditions, culture and lore of her beloved Appalachia, Kramer’s songs are introspective, gracefully gritty and fiercely memorable. They elegantly sweep listeners down the gravel roads and southern coastal highways, midnight truck stops and lonely motel rooms of “hard learning” and lead home to the wooded Blue Ridge Mountains with moving acceptance of our flawed human experience. Kramer’s live performances are equally as poignant and engaging; rich with accessible, warm, often hilarious storytelling and gracefully lifting the veil between audience and performer.
After a seven year stint as founding member, guitarist, vocalist and songwriter in the nationally-touring, Asheville-based all female Appalachian Folk outfit, The Barrel House Mamas from 2003-2010, Kramer recorded and released her first solo album, Break & Bloom, in Portland, Oregon in 2013. Following the February 2016 release of her acclaimed sophomore solo studio album, Carnival of Hopes, Kramer has been touring nationally and internationally, playing for sold-out audiences in listening rooms, theaters, pubs, festivals, living rooms and arts councils in support of the record. This has gained her a loyal following from Portland, Oregon to Scotland, U.K to Florence, Italy.
A former social worker, domestic violence crisis counselor and avid humanitarian, Kramer continues to perform and teach about the songwriting process in prisons, shelters for the unhoused, programs for at-risk youth, classrooms, hospitals and animal shelters, sharing her message of music as a powerful tool for healing, connection and compassion.
Whether Kramer is solo, wielding only her custom EJ Henderson guitar and her most important instrument: her emotive, ethereal voice, or backed by her full band featuring the virtuostic instrumentalists that comprise Asheville’s Free Planet Radio and internationally renowned multi-instrumentalist Billy Cardine (Biscuit Burners, Acoustic Syndicate, Lover’s Leap,) the power and poignance of this truly gifted songstress is deeply felt and long-remembered.
Quoted as “…an artist on the rise” by acclaimed American songwriter Mary Gauthier and as “…a voice that can only be described as one of the purest in modern Americana” By Dave Stallard of Blue Ridge Outdoors, Kramer has performed with such well-known artists as Joan Osborne, Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, Gretchen Peters, Appalachian troubadour Malcolm Holcombe, Shawn Mullins and Maria Muldaur.
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Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir, two books of poetry, the collage novel The Life & Times of American Crow, and the hybrid collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision. Beyond Repair: Encounters in a Fractured State, a book of nonfiction, came out from Red Hen Press in 2020. He lives with his family here in Asheville.
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Glenis Redmond is a performance poet, a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, and a Cave Canem alumni. In October of this year, Glenis was selected to be the City of Greenville’s first poet laureate. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone (Underground Epics, 2000), Under the Sun (Main Street Rag, 2002), and What My Hand Say (Press 53, 2016), Listening Skin (Four Way Books), Three Harriets & Others (Finishing Line Press), and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, Art by Jonathan Green, and Poetry by Glenis Redmond (University of Georgia Press). She is presently working on a seventh collection, Port Cities: Portals of the Second (Domestic) Middle Passage.
In 2020 Glenis received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award and in 2022 she was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.
Glenis was born on Shaw AFB in Sumter, South Carolina. She presently resides in Greenville, South Carolina. She was the founder of the Greenville Poetry Slam in the early 90’s. She confesses she is Bi-Carolinian as she lived in Asheville, North Carolina for seventeen years and was a vital leader in the poetry scene in the 90’s. During that time, she was a Southern Fried Slam champion of the individuals twice and ranked twice in the top ten at the National Slam. Glenis was awarded the WNC Best Poet through the Mountain Xpress so many times, she was placed in the Hall of Fame.
Glenis is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence program at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. She received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College while touring full-time as a poet and mother-of-twins, Amber, and Celeste Sherer. She is now a Gaga to three grandchildren Julian, age 7 and Paisley age 1 and newborn, Quinn.
Glenis has spent almost three decades touring the country as a poet and teaching artist. She served as the Poet-in-Resident for the Peace Center in Greenville and the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ. As a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, for seventeen years, Glenis has created and facilitated poetry workshops for school districts across the country.
Since 2014, she has served as the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program through Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In the past she has prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House.
Her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals nationally and internationally. Glenis believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent.