I'm pretty sure you are mistaken. As I understood, libevent provides a portable API on top of whatever async I/O mechanisms there are on the underlying system, selecting the best available implementation.
For Linux, I believe this it currently uses epoll, kqueue on freebsd, or select() or poll() on older systems.
None of those are asynchronous IO. They allow efficient querying of readability/writeability, typically used with *non-blocking* IO. In design pattern language they are "reactors", whereas async IO would be a "proactor." In API land you can tell the difference because with async APIs you have a callback: Twisted's Protocol/Transport APIs usually convert low-level change events (socket is readable) and non-blocking IO (reading the socket) to high-level async callbacks (dataReceived called with data).