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Monday 10am - 6pm Tuesday 10am - 6pm Wednesday 10am - 6pm Thursday 10am - 6pm Friday 10am - 6pm Saturday 10am - 6pm Sunday 10am - 3pm

City Lights Bookstore

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Sylva, NC
City Lights Bookstore

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Our indie bookstore is located in Sylva, North Carolina -- a small Main Street town tucked in the heart of the southern Appalachian Mountains.
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Browse our thoughtful selection of new and used books, cards, maps, gifts and more in downtown Sylva, NC. Trade-in used books every Wednesday and Saturday, until 5 p.m. Buy books and ebooks locally, online at: http://www.citylightsnc.com/aff/clfb

10/20/2026

📚 NEW AT CITY LIGHTS 📚

10/16/2026

Lauren K. Watel and Chelsea Rathburn will visit City Lights on Saturday, October 24th at 3:00pm. Lauren will read from her debut book of prose poetry, BOOK OF POTIONS, and Chelsea from her new poetry collection, BROKEN HOUSES.

Winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky.

Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions capture a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.

By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us.

“It wasn’t breaking and entering, / my parents swore, if a door / was already open,” Rathburn writes of a childhood spent slipping into construction sites for “furtive tours” of half-built homes. For the young poet, ‘For sale’ signs, dollhouses, and model homes represent wonder and possibility. Over time, though, this early wonder gives way to an awareness of both class difference and how easily our houses can be destroyed—whether by natural disasters or human forces—and with them our sense of stability and self.

10/14/2026

Anna Krome-Lukens will visit City Lights on Wednesday, October 21st at 6:00pm to share her new book, STRONG STATE, WEAK LINKS: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare.

How eugenics built the modern welfare state

In the early twentieth century, most US states established eugenics programs to “improve” the human race through selective breeding. North Carolina ran one of the nation’s most aggressive programs; between 1927 and 1977, at least 5,700 people were sterilized and thousands more were committed to institutions. While sterilizations in the 1950s and 1960s disproportionately targeted Black women receiving public assistance, the program’s early focus was on poor white women. These policies were framed as scientific and progressive, yet they were deeply intertwined with racial and class biases, reflecting long-standing social hierarchies in the South.

Anna Krome-Lukens examines those early years and reveals how white reformers such as social workers, politicians, and activists promoted the principles of eugenics while shaping the emerging welfare state before and during the New Deal. By using claims about fitness and mental defects to justify unequal access to public benefits, they defined who was worthy of care. Tracing this history, Strong State, Weak Links illuminates how North Carolina’s eugenics programs influenced the modern welfare state and how their legacy continues to shape debates over social policy today.

10/12/2026

Join us on Saturday, October 17th at 3:00pm for a poetry reading from the collection, Had I a Dove: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Floods featuring Hilda Downer, Narya Deckard, Pat Crittendon, Gene Hyde, and Karen Jackson.

Had I a Dove gathers the voices of over 95 poets in a moving anthology responding to the devastation of Hurricane Helene, which struck North Carolina and neighboring states in September 2024. Edited by acclaimed North Carolina poet Hilda Downer, these poems bear witness to loss, resilience, and the enduring spirit of Appalachian communities. Ranging from elegiac to hopeful, the collection is a testament to nature’s power and humanity’s ability to endure and rebuild.

10/11/2026

THANK YOU to our good friends Brent Martin and John Lane for visiting us yesterday to share their new books, WILLIAM BARTRAM AND THE NATURE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN and INTERVAL OWNERSHIP: New Tales from Edisto. We had another awesome crowd and appreciate everyone who came to celebrate two of our world’s finest authors.

As you can see from the last photo, Brent and John have written a deep collection of excellent books over the years. Poetry, novels, non-fiction, short stories — they can do it all. Come get signed copies of their new books and explore the rest if you’re unfamiliar with their work.

We’ll be back in the Regional Room next Saturday at 3PM for a reading with 5 poets from the anthology HAD I A DOVE: Appalachian Poets on the Helene Flood.

10/10/2026

Cedric is here for Spooky SZN. 🐈‍⬛ 🎃 👻 Come check out our horror/halloween/fall/pumpkin-themed displays and sip on somethin’ warm and sweet from our friends City Lights Cafe ☕️

10/09/2026

THANK YOU to David Smith for sharing his latest book, LETTERS FROM THE QUALLA BOUNDARY, with us yesterday evening, and to another curious and attentive crowd for showing up to learn.

We learned of David’s discovery of this passion project and how he became a citizen scholar and archivist, along with his hopes to connect with EBCI schools and organizations to support the Citizen Archivist program to preserve tens of thousands of more documents and letters.

We have signed copies waiting for you here! We’ll be back in the Regional Room tomorrow at 3PM to celebrate new books from Brent Martin and John Lane.

10/08/2026

Our October indie press spotlight is on Sarabande 📚

Come explore some of their exceptional catalog and spread the word about good work they do! Thank you Kristen Miller and the entire Sarabande team + their authors for keeping indie publishing alive and thriving. 🙌🏼

Address

3 East Jackson Street
Sylva, NC
28779

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm
Saturday	10am - 6pm
Sunday	10am - 3pm

Website

http://www.citylightsnc.com/

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