It’s a midweek morning at Asheville’s YMI Cultural Center . Upstairs, in a gallery featuring his wall-mounted sculptures, Dewayne Barton has just gotten off the phone, protesting his treatment earlier that morning at Buncombe County government office. “Being black here, being black anywhere, You have to have your own therapy to help you be able to move throughout the world,” Barton said. “The thing I just dealt with this morning is crap. ‘Oh, you need to take your bracelet off?’ I need to take

NOTE: The beginning of the audio version of this story depicts domestic violence. Theater students at Blue Ridge Community College , in Flat Rock, can count on an annual dose of creative social work. On a recent Wednesday, they were in rehearsal for an original play titled “Battered.” It’s a play within a play, with domestic violence underpinning the narrative.

Julia Christgau regarded 2018 as a year of yes. “I just got cast, cast, cast in all these things. I made three films and I did two plays,” she recalls. “I was like ‘Wow, maybe I’m an actor, finally.’” Then, through the auditions she took in 2019, the Asheville actress absorbed one rejection after another. “I’ve got a lot of nos,” she said. “I'm learning to let that roll off my back, and maybe that means something bigger is coming.”

Even when she isn’t leading one of her four high-intensity training classes every week , Jessica Tomasin is always in motion. She’s managed Echo Mountain recording studios since it opened 13 years ago. She co-founded the Asheville Music Professionals networking group, shepherded handfuls of events through her own production company, raised money for charities and given a TEDx talk. For this week’s Amadeus Festival through the Asheville Symphony, she has curated a discussion and concert devoted

It’s named for one of the most performed composers in history, but the Asheville Symphony’s Amadeus Festival is about far more than Mozart. This Saturday and Sunday, venerated rock guitarist and annual Christmas Jam founder Warren Haynes joins the symphony for the first orchestral renditions of music he’s associated with, from Government Mule, the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead to his solo work.

Romances on film sets go back to the silent era. Rarely do we hear about romances like that of Gloria Bailen and Curt Worden. Bailen and Worden had both worked behind the scenes for ABC television—Bailen as a producer, Worden as a videographer—but didn’t really know each other. Bailen’s friends recommended him and she hired him, 26 years ago. “I was a freelancer and I was doing a video, and I needed a crew,” Bailen recalled.

Kitty Tsunami is surf-punk-garage-pop band in Asheville led by the couple Meg Caldwell and Tommy Tsunami. They spoke with Blue Ridge Public Radio as they released their debut full-length album, titled “Cosa Nostra.” Kitty Tsunami shares the stage with local improvisational/atmospheric band Pink Mercury March 11 at the Mothlight to close out the Winter Music Series from the Asheville Area Arts Council and Asheville FM. Here, the couple tell a little about themselves and their music.

Jane Kramer almost had it too good. She was in a loving, long-term relationship, making music as part of the Barrel House Mamas and engaged in a career in social work. “Within about six or eight months, all those things collapsed,” Kramer said. “I was really, really broken. I was just in the wreckage and the shrapnel of all the ways my life here had decayed, and feeling like a tremendous failure, coupled with losing a dear friend in a really tragic way. Suddenly, I didn’t know how to find my

Margaret Curtis and her husband, their two sons and a joyful chihuahua-dachsund mix named Sally live on a quiet, curvy street on a hill above downtown Tryon. From the surface, it’s the quintessential American picture. Curtis doesn’t paint such pictures.

Emöke B’Rácz has survival in her blood. In 1956, Her father came to the United States from Hungary as a political exile. B’Rácz was 15 years old when she and the rest of her family followed him to Connecticut. “I did not speak the language. In Hungary, I was an ‘A’ student, and in the United States, I was at the bottom of the class,” she recalled because I couldn’t say anything very well.