Join us for an evening of music, poetry, and prose that explore theme of "mothering" — from mother nature and the nature of a mother, to parenting, reparenting, and beyond.
ARTIST LINE-UP
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Zachary Warren Briggs is a songwriter born, raised, and living in Asheville, North Carolina.
As a teen, he began remedially filling journals and finding melodies to match. Growing up in a home with close quarters, his music naturally settled into a place of gentleness: light finger-picking and hushed singing, so as not to disturb his sleeping family. His style began taking shape during nightly front-porch listening sessions, where he learned the power of dynamics from Sam Cooke and the almost-hypnotic effect of clever storytelling from Tom T. Hall. Eventually, he came across songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Blaze Foley, and Karen Dalton who taught living intentionally for song’s sake and poets like William Carlos Williams, who emphasized a grounded perception of the local.
Emerging from necessity, centered by family, propelled by restlessness, Zachary hopes his songs encapsulate sincere, relatable narratives.
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Erin Hallagan Clare is the founder and Artistic Director of Story Parlor. She is a certified Creativity Coach and Enneagram Practitioner, and is completing her Masters in Psychology with a Creativity Studies specialization. A writer and storyteller, she has told stories at The Moth, Listen to This, Testify, One Page Salon, Story Parlor, and Story Department, and is a Moth Story Slam Champion. Her writing can be found in Psychology Today, Thrive Global, and others, and she is a contributing author to the forthcoming The Coach’s Guide to Completing Creative Work published by Routledge.
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Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia PoetryPrize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Poetry, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. In her spare time, Forde also serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary and the fiction editor of Nat. Brut.
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Hannah Kaminer is a folk/Americana artist based in Asheville, NC. Raised in small towns in western North Carolina, she fuses echoes of Appalachian traditions with wistful, Americana-style songwriting.
Kaminer's songs have been recognized in the finals of the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest (MerleFest 2019), with a Regional Artist Project Grant from a coalition of NC arts councils, and by Asheville's Brown Bag Songwriting Competition (winning grand prize and crowd favorite).
Kaminer has released two studio albums, Acre by Acre (2015) and Heavy Magnolias (2018). Kaminer co-produced Heavy Magnolias with award-winning engineer Julian Dreyer. In 2020, she pivoted to produce Music for Quarantine, connecting musicians to virtual gigs performed for loved ones in isolation.
As of winter 2022, Kaminer is working on a new album with her band (Hannah & The Wistfuls), to be released in 2023.
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Lori Horvitz’ personal essays have appeared in Hobart, Epiphany, South Dakota Review, The Laurel Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Bustle, and Hotel Amerika, among other literary journals. Professor of English at UNC Asheville, her most recent book, Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep, earned a starred Kirkus review, and her first collection of memoir-essays, The Girls of Usually, won the 2016 Gold Medal IPPY Book Award in Autobiography/Memoir.