City Lights Bookstore in Sylva will feature local authors of poetry and nonfiction in the coming week.

Coffee with the Poet will meet at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 17, with Brent Martin. Martin, the featured poet, lives in Cowee and works in forest conservation with The Wilderness Society. His published poetry collections include A Shout in the Woods (2010), and Poems from Snow Hill Road (2007).

WCU authors will be the focus of an event at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 18. The bookstore will host a reception celebrating recent books by the WCU faculty.

The first featured authors will be Elizabeth Heffelfinger and Laura Wright, co-authors of Visual Difference: Postcolonial Studies and Intercultural Cinema, published by Peter Lang Publishers. The reception will also honor Bill Anderson, Jane Brown, and Anne Rogers, co-editors of the Payne-Butrick Papers, a multi-volume collection devoted to Cherokee history and culture up through the Removal, recently published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Heffelfinger is assistant professor of English and coordinator of the Motion Picture Studies Program in English at WCU. Laura Wright is associate professor and director of graduate studies in English at WCU. Bill Anderson is professor of history emeritus, Jane Brown is instructor in anthropology, and Anne Rogers is professor of anthropology, all at WCU.

586.9499.