Punch Bucket Lit Festival debuts in Asheville this weekend.
The festival takes place Friday, Sept. 20 and Saturday, Sept. 21. It includes 60 author readings, a book fair, writing workshops and headliners like novelist Lauren Groff and poet José Olivarez. The new literary festival is produced by local nonprofit Punch Bucket Lit.
For festival founder Rachel Hanson the event is a way to bring readers and writers – who often live more solitary lives – out of hiding.
“There are a lot of writers here,” Hanson said. “I've been sort of astounded by just how many folks have settled here, lots of poets, prose writers and there’s also a big YA [Young Adult fiction] scene, as well.
“There's a lot of time just spent alone, trying to figure out your characters or you know, the narrative, the craft, the line, the sound, the rhythm,” Hanson said. “It’s just so time-consuming that, of course, you do need to be alone and left alone, I always joke.”
The festival “is a way to come out and have a community with other writers and readers who want to read what you've been up to,” she said.
The festival evolved from Punch Bucket’s monthly reading series, which is named after Hanson’s cat, Punch.
Hanson, author of The End of Tennessee and a UNC Asheville English professor, started the reading series in 2021.
The same year, Hanson met author and musician Alex McWalters, who later joined as Punch Bucket’s Outreach Director. Now, the organization is a registered non-profit with its own podcast.
Punch Bucket gathers writers at breweries – and more recently, Revolve, a vintage clothing store in West Asheville – to share poems, short stories and other forms of creative works. The readings primarily feature local authors but they’ve also attracted talent from across the country.
What to expect at the festival
The inaugural Punch Bucket festival builds on the cadence of the reading series, which typically involves drinks, conversations, music and several acts that last for a little over an hour. After the readings, the audience has the chance to ask the author questions.
Festivities kick off Friday night at the Wortham Center with a “Rapid Reading” event that will efficiently cycle through five-minute readings from 19 writers.
The opening event is a good chance for the audience to decide which authors they’d like to see perform on Saturday. The same authors at the Rapid Reading event will give longer individual readings on Saturday.
Saturday’s keynote event includes a conversation between novelist Lauren Groff, named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME in 2024, and Tessa Fontaine, author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts.
The conversation will focus on the arc of Groff’s writing career and how it has helped shape her political and literary citizenship. To help kick off the conversation, Groff will open with a 10-minute reading.
Groff, a three-time National Book Award winner, writes about strong and complicated women from a wide range of time periods. Her most recent novel, Matrix, is set in twelfth-century England and follows the story of a poet who is sent to live in a monastery.
“She’s fabulous. She’s fascinating. I love the way she brings in a lot of historical research and places both contemporary and the present that we don’t consider,” Hanson said. “She takes us out of our world and puts us in a whole other one.”
Groff, who has also published a book of short stories titled Florida, runs a bookstore in Gainesville called The Lynx, which is devoted to selling banned books written by BIPOC authors.
Hanson’s biggest hope with this year’s festival is that it sells out. One day, she hopes the festival will garner enough community support so that it is free to attend.
“We want everybody from everywhere. So we don't want to just be like a Southern literary thing. We want to be an all-literary thing,” she said.
“Asheville is so beautiful. There’s so many great people here. I want people to see that," she said. "I want people to come to Asheville and experience that through the lens of literature.”
Punch Bucket Literary Festival runs Sept. 20 and 21. Events take place at the Diana Wortham Center for Performing Arts and the Renaissance Hotel, in downtown Asheville. See the full schedule.
