Once each month Poets and Writers Reading Poems and Stories is held at the Folk School in the Keith House Living Room. Members of North Carolina Writers Network West read their original work for an audience of Folk School students and the community. These writers and poets come from all over the southwestern mountain area of North Carolina, north Georgia and South Carolina. The featured reader for this month's meeting is: Karen Holmes Karen Paul Holmes, an award-winning business writer, began focusing on poetry after coming to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies including Reach of Song, Clothes Lines, Echoes Across the Blue Ridge and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers Over 50, and will appear in journals such as Poetry East (Spring 2010) and Atlanta Review (Fall 2010) and Karen enjoys reading her poetry in public, classical music, Ikebana, contradancing, her husband, her daughter and two Welsh Terriers. Mary Ricketson Mary Ricketson has a long career as a Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor in rural western North Carolina. She has a special interest in women?s issues, victims of abuse, and family and couple relationships. Her work is well known locally. She is listed in Who?s Who in American Women. She lives in a hand made house in the woods where she planted and maintains an organic blueberry farm. Her poems reflect her connections with a wealth of people and her close bond with the earth. Mary has been writing poetry for twenty years and has recently completed her first chapbook, I Hear the River Call My Name, published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been published in Lights in the Mountains, Freeing Jonah IV, various magazines, and in Disorgananza, a private collection distributed among family and friends in 2000. For fifteen years she has written a monthly column, "Woman to Woman," for a weekly newspaper in Murphy, NC, The Cherokee Scout. She is a member of North Carolina Writers Network.