Asheville celebration honors Wilma Dykeman and Andrea Clark legacy

Asheville will gather Thursday, May 21, for a 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. program at the Mission Health / A-B Tech Conference Center that pairs art, music and storytelling with a tribute to Andrea Clark, the photographer and archivist who helped preserve Black Asheville’s memory. The annual Wilma Dykeman Birthday Celebration is being presented as “Bearing Witness: The Arts and the Call to Justice,” a public reminder that the city’s cultural life has long been tied to civic action.

The event will mark Wilma Dykeman’s 106th birthday anniversary. Born May 20, 1920, Dykeman became one of Asheville’s defining literary and environmental voices, and UNC Asheville has described her as a writer, speaker, activist and teacher who also became a groundbreaking environmentalist, a pioneering civil rights reporter and a founder of Appalachian Studies. Her legacy continues through the Wilma Dykeman Legacy, a nonprofit founded in 2012 to carry forward her values of environmental integrity, social justice and the power of the written and spoken word.

That mission still has a physical anchor in North Asheville. In late 2019, RiverLink secured a conservation easement on Dykeman’s historic homestead, the 11.38-acre childhood property tied to her environmental work. The land preservation effort underscored how Dykeman’s influence reaches beyond books and speeches into the landscape of Buncombe County itself.

This year’s celebration also places Andrea Clark at the center of the evening’s meaning. Clark, who died in 2025, spent decades documenting Black life in Asheville and Buncombe County, including neighborhoods, churches, businesses, traditions and community leaders. Obituary listings identified her as Andrea Elizabeth Clarke, 1945-2025. An Asheville Museum of History exhibit has highlighted her photographs from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, including images of East End and Valley Street before urban renewal changed those communities.

Event listings identify Lyric, storyteller Becky Stone, Brenda Mills and Jim Stokely as participants. Stokely, who leads Wilma Dykeman Legacy and is Dykeman’s son, has helped frame the birthday observance as more than a commemoration of a famous writer. It is a shared civic stage for two women whose work shaped how Asheville remembers itself, who gets included in that memory and how culture can still carry the city’s oldest arguments about justice, preservation and belonging.