David Watkins of Cullowhee will offer a free personal budgeting workshop at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 16. The program is based on his book, Little is Much: Learn How to Live Within Your Means — Seven Steps to Financial Freedom.

The workshop is free and open to the public. Copies of Little is Much will be available and can be autographed by the author.

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Poet John Thomas York will be at City Lights at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 16, to read from his new collection, Naming the Constellations, which was published by Sylva’s Spring Street Editions in collaboration with Ash Creek Press in Portland, Ore.

The event will also serve as a celebration of Spring Street Editions, which has published several works of poetry by local and national writers.

The title poem in the collection has won the Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society in 2008. Other of York’s poems have appeared in the Greensboro Review, which awarded him its Literary Award for Poetry in 1985.

A career public school teacher, York was named the 2003 Teacher of the Year by the North Carolina English Teachers Association. He lives in Greensboro.

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Poetry continues on Sunday afternoon when Nancy Simpson will be at City Lights for a special reception and reading at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 17, to read from her new collection, Living Above the Frost Line.

The book is the inaugural title in the new Carolina Wren Press Laureate Series, supported by the North Carolina Arts Council.

For more information about any of these events call 828.586.9499.