About Us

The original Flatiron Writers began meeting in the Flatiron Building on Asheville’s Wall Street in 1993. Since then, meetings have moved around to different places in town: PJ’s Coffee Shop, Gourmet Perks, Port City Java and Greenlife, just to name the most memorable. The group has been as many as eight and as few as three.

Current Members

Genève Bacon moved to Asheville from New York City 16 years ago. Since then, she has taught adult education courses on literature and on "The Female Face of Heroism," at the College for Seniors, and served as a theater critic for the MAIN website. Her fiction has appeared in the literary publication Yemassee, took third place in an American Short Fiction contest, and was a semi-finalist in the 2007 Pirate's Alley William Faulkner-William Windom Creative Writing Competition. In 2004, she was awarded a Regional Artist Project Grant as an Emerging Artist.

A current MFA candidate in the Hollins University Creative Writing MFA Program, Jennifer Fawkes received her BA in Anthropology from Columbia University. She writes short fiction and is at work on what she is eighty-four percent certain will be her first novel. Jennifer has never lived in one place for more than three years and has worn a number of occupational hats, including that of bartender, freelance manuscript reader, income tax preparer, and porn video warehouse shipping clerk.

Toby Heaton has worked as a computer consultant, cook and pastry chef in Asheville since 1995. His short story, Southern Revival, was a co-winner of the New Millennium fiction award for 2002. A shorter version of Long Long Road won third place in the North Carolina Writer’s Network fiction contest in 1997. His fiction has appeared in New Millennium, WNC Woman and The Asheville Review. He lives with his dog Max a mile from downtown.

Raleigh native Heather Newton is an attorney and mediator in Asheville, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Her fiction has appeared in Crucible, Encore Magazine, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, O, Georgia!, Wellspring and WNC Woman, and been recognized in competitions including the Robert Ruark Society short fiction contest, Pirate’s Alley William Faulkner-William Wisdom creative writing competition, Iowa Woman contest, Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize competition and Dana Awards. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees was a semifinalist (top 100) for the 2009 Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award and is forthcoming from HarperCollins in January 2011.

Maggie Marshall moved to Asheville two years ago from Los Angeles. Her first career was as a professional actress, twenty-some-odd years of which she spent performing on regional stages throughout the U.S., as well as Broadway, Los Angeles, and Dublin, Ireland. She then moved into screenwriting, eventually landing in television and writing for numerous cable and syndicated one-hour drama series. She was the recipient of the Carl Sautter Memorial Screenwriting Award and a Scriptapalooza Award, both for One-Hour Drama. She is currently at work on her first novel, The Gondolier’s Wife, and lives in West Asheville with her husband, Stephen, and Yuri the Wonderdog.

Marjorie Klein's first novel, Test Pattern (Wm. Morrow Publishers, 2000; HarperCollins/ Perenniel 2001) was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in various publications, including 20 years of free-lance work for Tropic, the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine. She has taught at the University of Miami, Warren Wilson College, and Florida International University (where she received her MFA), and has led workshops at the Florida Center for Literary Arts at Miami Dade College, UNC-Asheville’s Center for Creative Retirement and UNCA’s Great Smokies Writers Program. Recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in 2007, and honorable mention in 2002, she served as a preliminary judge in the writing category for the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts from 1991-2006, until she moved to Asheville. She has recently completed a new novel, Shifting Gears.