Please join Cake Ladies by Jodi Rhoden, Flying Cloud Farm, Buxton Hall Barbecue, and Short Street Cakes in welcoming Crop Stories to Asheville with a free wine-and-small-bites launch party at HORSE + HERO on Friday, November 3rd from 6-9pm.

Crop Stories founding editor André Gallant will offer a short reading, and copies of the new issue will be available for sale for $12. This fourth issue of Crop Stories is “a 144-page homage to the sweet potato, featuring recipes, investigative reporting, memoir, narrative, and photography by storytellers from around the South. Fifteen recipes. Stories about Black Land Matters, finding community in a slaughterhouse, and real lives in the Sweet Potato Capital of the World.”

We’ll bring the wine, and Flying Cloud Farm is donating Fairview-grown sweet potatoes, which will be made into mini sweet potato cupcakes by Short Street Cakes and mini sweet potato biscuits and sweet potato ginger cookie sandwiches by Buxton Hall.

Jessica Rosenkoetter and Jean Smith, editors of the local psychedelic feminist zine The Talismanic Potato will be on hand with copies available, and I will be signing copies of Cake Ladies, just in time for the holidays!

We hope you’ll join us!

Crop Stories is a nonprofit, biannual journal that digs deep into relationships between farmer and field, consumer and market, soil and table. Each issue adopts one crop as a theme, then applies narrative, journalism, and recipe to meditate on the state of the small farm in the American South. Our stories generate from this great swath of verdant land because we believe the region is well-suited as a source for timely, engaging stories about farming. In Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, and beyond, issues of class, race, identity, and sustainability intersect in the act of growing food and feeding our communities.

Crop stories is edited by André Gallant, Keia Mastrianni, Nicole Taylor, and Kylie Wagner.