Louise Runyon will give a poetry reading with Atlanta poet Rupert Fike at City Lights Books on Friday, October 17th at 6:00pm. Rupert will read from his latest collection, All Things in Common: POEMS FROM THE FARM. Louise will read both new and published works.
Poetry Reading: Louise Runyon and Rupert Fike
Friday, October 17, 6:00 pm
City Lights Bookstore, 3 E. Jackson St., Sylva, NC 28779
All Things in Common: POEMS FROM THE FARM by Georgia poet Rupert Fike is a vibrant, multi-voiced poetry collection chronicling the rise of The Farm—a 1970s commune in rural Tennessee founded by hippies and activists seeking to redefine the American Dream. Through poems that blend social and personal history, Fike captures the idealism, absurdity, and raw humanity of a countercultural movement that pushed boundaries, questioned norms, and embraced community. With his signature blend of dark humor, tenderness, and hopeful vision, Fike invites readers into a world where utopia was improvised, lived, and sometimes stumbled over, offering a timely reminder of the enduring power of collective dreaming.
Rupert Fike left the University of Georgia in his junior year to work in the Peace and Civil Rights movements of the late 1960s. He and his wife, Kathy, moved to San Francisco, where they helped found The Farm, a spiritual community in middle Tennessee. They have two daughters and three grandchildren and currently reside in Clarkston, Georgia. Rupert Fike’s second collection of poems, Hello the House (Snake Nation Press) was named as one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read, 2018” by The Georgia Center for the Book. He was the finalist as Georgia Author of the Year after his first collection, Lotus Buffet (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2011).
His stories and poems have appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, The Main Street Rag, Kestrel, Scalawag Magazine, The Georgetown Review, A&U America’s AIDS Magazine, The Flannery O’Connor Review, Duende, The Buddhist Poetry Review, Natural Bridge and others. He was the editor of Voices From The Farm, a non-fiction title from The Book Publishing Company, 1997. He also has a poem inscribed in a downtown Atlanta plaza.
Louise Runyon, a local poet with deep roots in Western North Carolina, comes from a long line of visionary activists. She has published five books of poetry, and has “a gift for connecting generations… and bridging gaps divided by race, language, and culture.” Along with Rupert Fike, Runyon was part of a vibrant community of poets in Atlanta, moving to Western NC in 2019. A dancer and choreographer as well as poet, she is the director of Louise Runyon Performance Company.
Where Is Our Prague Spring?, Runyon’s most recent book, examines her deep love for the mountains, her childhood experience of love there, and her attempts to reconcile this love with the hatred and division found in the present. A great-niece of Lucy Morgan, founder of the renowned Penland School of Crafts, Runyon honors her visionary and activist family in these poems.
Says poet Catherine Carter of Western Carolina University, “…Runyon interrogates the place and her family’s long history there to illuminate a complicated tradition of Appalachian progressivism dating both back to and forward from the Trail of Tears. These thoughtful poems evoke an Appalachia that few outsiders know: simultaneously progressive and conservative, woven into the wider world in unexpected ways, and rooted deeply in the labor and vision of women.” All of her books are available at City Lights Books in Sylva, NC.
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