“The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels.”
— Patti Smith

This is going to be fun. I enjoyed reading American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author and photographer Patti Smith’s new memoir “Bread of Angels: A Memoir” (Random House, 2025, 267 pages). Smith, who has fused rock music and poetry in her 12 recordings over the years and who is the author of 11 books, now at age 78, is still rockin’ and rollin’ and scribbling some mighty fine biographical prose.  

As author Thomas Rain Crowe discovered during his own long journey from Western North Carolina to California to Europe (and with due respect to another Western North Carolinian, Thomas Wolfe), you can go home again. Crowe did.

Acclaimed Western North Carolina author Thomas Rain Crowe will present his new book, “New Natives: Becoming Indigenous in a Time of Crisis and Transition,” with photographer Simone Lipscomb at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva.

Henry T. and Priscilla M. Ireys will share their new book, “The Keep: Living with the Tame and the Wild on a Mountain Farm,” at 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 1, at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva. 

Nonprofit Pisgah Legal Services will welcome Imani Perry as its 14th Annual Justice Forum keynote speaker on Oct. 23 in Asheville with a free watch party happening simultaneously in Cullowhee.  

The event is free, but registration is required. This event is made possible by presenting sponsors Jacquelyn and Bruce Rogow and others generous members of our community. 

“Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Misdeeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in Great Smoky Mountains National Park Volume I” is now available in e-book format on popular electronic reader platforms.

The Highlands Biological Foundation is welcoming celebrated author and nature writer Georgann Eubanks as the featured speaker for the next installment of the 2025 Zahner Conservation Lecture Series. Her talk, titled “Finding the Fabulous Ordinary,” will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 7, at the Highlands Nature Center. This event is free and open to the public, with a small reception to follow. 

Reminiscent of “Starting From San Francisco,” one of the first books by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco is also where Victor Depta spent some of his early years and where this 2024 reprint of his 1973 book “The Creek” (Ohio Univ. Press, 2024) begins — with references to Coit Tower, Nob Hill and the Fillmore District when he was there and reading Wordsworth, Whitman and Rimbaud.

Local author and award-winning Smoky Mountain News columnist Chris Cox will make an appearance at Smoky Mountain Roasters in Hazelwood from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, July 26.

Search online, or in a library or bookshop, and you’ll find how-to books about parenting. Recent popular titles include “Simplicity Parenting,” “The Five Principles of Parenting” and “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.” There are even books about how not to parent, like Leonard Sax’s “The Collapse of Parenting.”