The Writers at Home Series continues with readings by local authors Valerie Bandura and Karen Salyer McElmurray at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 21, at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café, 55 Haywood St. Writers at Home is part of the Great Smokies Writing Program, a consortium of Western North Carolina writers and UNC Asheville. The event is free and open to the public.

Bandura graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College where she was nominated for the prestigious Ruth Lilly Fellowship for poets. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including “Best New Poets of 2005,” “Poet Lore,” Cimarron Review” and “Crazyhorse.” Her latest poetry manuscript, “On Fire Under Water,” is now in circulation. Currently, she serves as the 2004-2006 Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College.

McElmurray, formerly of Asheville, is the author of the acclaimed memoir “Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey,” which was heralded by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” The book received the 2003 Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Award for Creative Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Notable Book Award. McElmurray’s debut novel, “Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven,” was winner of the 2001 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. She currently serves as assistant professor in Georgia College and State University’s creative writing graduate program as well as the creative nonfiction editor for “Arts and Letters.”

For more information, call Elaine Fox, UNC Asheville director of Extension and Distance Education at 828/232-5122.