Poetry Reading + Book Launch: The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry

The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry
A Book Launch + Poetry Reading in collaboration with Bagatelle Books
Thursday, May 29th, 2025 at 7PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street, Asheville, NC}
Free and Open to All

Join us for the Asheville book launch of The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry. Co-editor Joseph Bathanti will join us at the museum, and a multi-generational lineup of WNC poets, curated in collaboration with Bagatelle Books, will read excerpts from the anthology.

Edited by Blake Hobby, Alessandro Porco, Joseph Bathanti, The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry is published by The University of North Carolina Press in association with Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. This brand-new volume features over fifty BMC poets selected with an expansive historical and critical lens, including BMC luminaries like M.C. Richards, Jonathan Williams, and Susan Weil, alongside those not typically considered as poets, such as artist Cynthia Homire, composer John Cage, architect Buckminster Fuller, and artist Josef Albers. Many years in the making, this book presents the clearest picture of the poetry and poetics of Black Mountain College yet.

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Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the author of ten books of poetry and winner of numerous awards including the Roanoke-Chowan Award, Carolina Novel Award, Novello Literary Award, Spokane Prize, Will D. Campbell Award for Creative Nonfiction, and The Order of the Long Leaf Pine. Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He is Professor of English & McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education and Writer-in-Residence of Watauga Residential College, as well as affiliate faculty in Appalachian Studies & The Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies. He is the recipient of Appalachian State’s 100 Scholars Research Award, 2009; the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity, 2021; the Donald W. Sink Family Outstanding Scholar Award for 2020-21; and The Board of Governors Appalachian State University Excellence in Teaching Award, 2022. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program.

“Finally, we have the Black Mountain poets—a diverse community of potters, painters, scientists, homemakers, scholars, and prose writers—whose poems pay tribute to the unique learning community that nurtured the creative spirit of its fortunate inhabitants. Hobby, Porco, and Bathanti have opened the field and shuffled the deck. I eagerly await the new thinking that inevitably will follow.”

— Mary Emma Harris, author of The Arts at Black Mountain College

“The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry is exemplary in the breadth of its selection, an impressive showcase of unity in diversity and the quality of the introductory notes that, moreover, present the immense advantage not to reproduce the traditional distinction between the College’s stars and the others.”

— Leonardo