An acclaimed Southern author and North Carolina’s former poet laureate are the highlights of this year’s writers’ workshop at Isothermal Community College.

The event, in its 11^th year, will be held on Saturday, March 28, from 9 a.m.-2 p.m. in the Business Sciences Building.

The featured writers this year are Tony Earley, a Rutherford County native, and Cathy Smith Bowers of Mill Spring. The topics will include the physiology of sound and the construction and use of metaphor.

The registration fee includes snacks, coffee and tea. The deadline to register is Friday, March 20.

Smith Bowers served as poet laureate of North Carolina from 2010 to 2012.  She is the author of five books: “The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas” (inaugural winner of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Competition 1992); “Traveling in Time of Danger;” “A Book of Minutes; The Candle I Hold Up to See You;” and “Like Shining From Shook Foil.” Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review.

Her awards include the 1990 General Electric Award for Younger Writers, Queens University’s 2002 J.B. Fuqua Distinguished Educator Award, and the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet Award, 2006 and 2007. This year the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) selected “The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers” as its 2014 Poetry Winner.

She is a graduate of Winthrop University, and has done graduate work in modern British poetry at Oxford University in England.  She is currently on the faculty of the Haden Institute, Queens’ MFA in Creative Writing Program, and Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. She lives in Mill Spring, N.C.

Earley is the author of five books: “Here We Are in Paradise,” a collection of stories; the novels “Jim the Boy” and “The Blue Star;” and a personal essay collection. His new book, “Mr. Tall: a Novella and Stories,” appeared in August, 2014.

A winner of a National Magazine Award for fiction, he was named one of the 20 best writers of his generation by both Granta, in 1996, and The New Yorker, in 1999. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Oxford American, The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South and many other magazines and anthologies.

He is a native of Rutherford County and a graduate of Warren Wilson College and The University of Alabama. He lives in Nashville, Tenn., with his wife and daughters, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

For more information or to register, contact Dr. Kathy Ackerman, Isothermal’s dean of Arts and Sciences, at kackerman@isothermal.edu or call 828-395-1301.

–       Submitted by Mike Gavin