NOTE: THIS SESSION IS FREE FOR FWR ANNUAL MEMBERS, $25 for Non-Members

In our Fall 2025 Fourth Quarter Office Hours with Heather and Maggie, we’ll be joined by Charlotte Lit Co-Founder and Executive Director, Paul Reali, to discuss all things related to finding community and taking advantage of the many opportunities offered to writers by literary organizations such as Charlotte Lit and the Flatiron Writer’s Room. Whether it’s year-long writing labs, one-off classes on specific topics, co-working spaces, writing retreats, agent events, social gatherings, memberships and discounts, or scholarships and literary contests and prizes, we’ll delve into how you can make your writing community work best for you—and how YOU can help it become even stronger and more vibrant. Don’t miss this discussion and Q & A and be sure to bring your burning questions - we’d love to answer them!

Paul Reali is co-founder of Charlotte Lit, a nonprofit literary arts center in Charlotte, NC. He won the 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Award and is a past winner of the Elizabeth Simpson Smith Short Story and Ruth Moose Flash Fiction awards. His writing on creativity and business has been widely published, and his recent fiction can be found in the North Carolina Literary Review.He was awarded a Wildacres residency in 2022, and received a Regional Artist Project Grant from Charlotte’s Arts & Science Council in 2018. He has an M.S. in Creativity from Buffalo State University. Contact: paul@charlottelit.org.

Maggie Marshall moved to Asheville from Los Angeles in 2006. Her first career was as a professional actress, which she spent performing on regional stages throughout the U.S., as well as Broadway, Los Angeles, and Dublin, Ireland. She then shifted into screenwriting, eventually landing in television and writing for numerous cable and syndicated one-hour drama series. She is the recipient of the Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Award and a Scriptapalooza Award, both for One-Hour Drama. She has been a fiction contributor at the Tin House Writer's Workshop, a fellow at the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, a Writer-in-Residence at the Weymouth Center for the Arts, and a proud member of the Flatiron Writers group. She recently completed work on a novel which is currently being shopped to publishers, and has had fiction and nonfiction pieces published in The Great Smokies Review. 

Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer's Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) won the NC Indie Author Project book award for adult fiction, was a finalist for the Forword INDIES Book of the Year and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022), was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance as an Okra Pick (“great southern fiction fresh off the vine”). She teaches creative writing for UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit as well as the Flatiron Writers Room.