Juniper Bends Reading Series

06/12/2026

Joining us tonight, June 12th, at Story Parlor!
Tickets here.

https://storyparloravl.com/calendar/juniper-bends-spring26-vol2

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.

06/10/2026

Excited to welcome to the Juniper stage this Friday June 12th, Susanne Paola Antonetta!
Ticket's here.
https://storyparloravl.com/calendar/juniper-bends-spring26-vol2

Susanne’s latest book is The Devil's Castle: Eugenics, N**i 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.

06/09/2026

Joining us this Friday at Story Parlor!
Zackary Vernon
Tickets here.

https://storyparloravl.com/calendar/juniper-bends-spring26-vol2

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).

06/08/2026

Our Juniper Bends event is this Friday the 12th!
Tickets are here!

https://storyparloravl.com/calendar/juniper-bends-spring26-vol2

Our featured musician is Lillie Syracuse. 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.

05/29/2026

Coming up in two weeks on Friday, June 12 at Story Parlor! Tickets available now!

Long-running reading series, Juniper Bends, presents an evening of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and music featuring local and visiting artists.

04/27/2026

Our summer reading date is firm for June 12th. Join us for our second reading of the 2026 season! Our summer theme is “A Midsummer Night’s Feast” Watch this page for lineup and ticket information.

04/15/2026

Juniper Bend’s curator, Lockie Hunter, will be reading this coming Saturday, April 18th in Black Mountain at this wonderful event! Tickets available now!

04/01/2026

Our five performers at our spring Juniper reading. Still thinking about the powerful words and music that were offered.
Story Parlor
Barbara Roether
Thomas Calder
Mackenzie Kozak
Lockie Hunter
Brit Washburn