Three writers celebrate literary mentorship and engage with history as a liberating way forward.

Asheville authors Susanne Paola Antonetta and Bruce Beasley will read from their new books along with their former student Julie Marie Wade. Together they'll explore themes of neurodiversity, queer identity and homophobia, climate denial and catastrophe, political oppression and war, eugenics and the current failing state of an American psychiatric industry deeply embrangled with corporate pharmaceutical interests.

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of multiple acclaimed books of nonfiction and co-author of the widely taught textbook Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her work deals with madness, neurodiversity, the history of psychiatry, the toxic effects of environmental pollution. Her new book published in September, The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today, is a history of the Nazi program T4 aimed at exterminating the neurodiverse and a critique of contemporary psychiatry that has its roots in Nazi eugenics. The book received a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

Bruce Beasley is the author of nine collections of poems and the recipient of four Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust. His work engages atrocities against the Palestinians of Gaza, mass shootings and gun violence, wildfires and climate change catastrophe and denial. His most recently published books are Prayershreds (Orison Books), All Soul Parts Returned (BOA Editions), and Theophobia (BOA Editions). Bruce's work appears in New American Writing, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Yale Review, and many other journals.

Julie Marie Wade studied in Susanne and Bruce's graduate creative writing program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington and has gone on to be a prolific and award-winning author. She is is the author of twenty two volumes of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, including the new memoir Other People's Mothers (University Press of Florida). A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Julie is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami.