Professor Laura Hope-Gill, MFA, directs the Narrative Healthcare and Creative Writing MFA Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University. An award-winning poet, memoirist, and architectural historian, she is a North Carolina Arts Council Fellow, the Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a winner of the North Carolina Literary Review’s Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, the first Okra Pick Prize of the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, The Harlan Joel Gradin Award for Excellence in the Public Humanities, the founder and director of Asheville Wordfest Multicultural Poetry Festival, The Society of North Carolina Historian Award for her two Architectural Histories of Asheville, and Lenoir-Rhyne University Raymond Bost Distinguished Professor Award. Her writing appears in Parabola, North Carolina Literary Review, Fugue, Bellevue Literary Review, and more. She is currently an apprentice storyteller to the Connie Regan-Blake. Her collection of Poetry, The Soul Tree, was published in 2008 by Grateful Steps Publishing in Asheville. Her two architectural histories of Asheville, Look Up Asheville I and II were released in 2010 and 2011. She has recently written a book about the deep and haunting mechanism by which our stories heal us so well. Her book this apprenticeship has borne, Bee Bread: How the Hive of Story Listening and Storytelling (Still) Heals the World, will emerge in the Fall of 2026.