Why not? This Saturday, May 14, from 10 AM to 5 PM is this book fest in East Liberty. Six Gallery authors will be there, reading from their works, which will also be available at the book fair table we’ll most likely be sharing w/ pals from After Happy Hour.
11:45 AM at the Poetry Tent in Bakery Square (LOL), catch Angele Ellis (Arab on Radar, Under the Kaufmann’s Clock) & Don Wentworth (Past All Traps, Yield to the Willow, With a Deepening Presence).
Then, at 1:00 PM in the East Liberty Presbyterian Church, catch Paola Corso (Vertical Bridges), sharing the stage (or altar) w/ Sharon Dilworth. Register on Eventbrite to make sure you get a seat for this one.
There are all sorts of other events, readings, & whatnot throughout the day, including a puppet show at 10 AM & a jazz set by the excellent Deanna Witkowski Trio at 5 PM (also prob. a good idea to register).
So drop by if you’re not at Pittonkatonk or doing something else!
New year, new book: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of the weird, including a previously unpublished story and novelette, by the author of Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
100% true & accurate blurbs:
“By turns enigmatic, funny, and terrifying, Brandon Getz has crafted a daring, expansive debut collection. For lovers of realism, satire, speculative fiction, and psychological horror, the genre-bending Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before has something for everyone.”
– Taylor Grieshober, author of Off Days
“Brandon Getz is to magical realism what the electric guitar is to music – a thunderous narrative force, transforming folk tales into power ballads and reenergizing stock characters. Lyrical and improvisatory, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before showcases Getz’s many literary rhythms. These stories are grungy. They’re lo-fi. And you’ll want to listen straight to the end.”
-Robert Isenberg, author of Curse of the Qattara
“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before hopscotches around your psyche with stories to fit every mood. From laugh-aloud funny to utterly heartbreaking, this is a fantastic collection that never lets up.”
-Gwendolyn Kiste, author of Reluctant Immortals
“Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of visitation, hauntings by demons and decaying code, house spirits and homunculi. Brandon Getz has written a beautiful book of magic and loss.”
-Samuel Ligon, author of Miller Cane: A True & Exact History
“Getz’s M.O. is to take genre forms and then mercilessly humanize them until they start to feel like Chekhov. A++”
-Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
Reviews too! So far, so good, will update as more appear.
“In these 12 stories, Getz fully embraces characters who are desperate, strange, and often have absolutely no idea what to do next. In this way he creates a collection that is deeply weird but also strikingly human.”
Online, it’s currently available from Bookshop, Indiebound, Powell’s, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, & wherever else (ebook versions too, if you’re into that). They all say Large Print but it’s a lie, unless 12 pt. counts (it doesn’t). If you’re in Pittsburgh, White Whale Bookstore should have more signed copies shortly. Interested booksellers & librarians can order copies from Ingram.
New year, new book: Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before is twelve tales of the weird, including a previously unpublished story and novelette, by the author of Lars Breaxface: Werewolf in Space.
It’s currently available on Amazon & Barnes & Noble but should be up on Bookshop.org & elsewhere shortly (ebook version too, if you’re into that). Booksellers & librarians can get it straight from Ingram.
Along w/ the book, there’s a reading Friday, January 14th hosted by White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield. Yes, it’s a Zoom thing, which is not my preference (& I greatly look forward to doing some live events again this year!), but given that half the readers are in Rhode Island, it makes sense for this one. RSVP at Eventbrite & tune in at 7 PM ET on the 14th to hear Brandon & co. tell you stories you likely haven’t heard before.
Join us for a creative reading, followed by an open mic, at the Soap Gallery, 117 S. Champion St. Co-host Christopher Barzak. We will also be celebrating National Strawberry Sundae Day.
Jason Baldinger is from Pittsburgh and misses roaming the country writing poems. His newest book is A Threadbare Universe (Kung Fu Treachery Press). His work has been published widely across print journals and online. You can hear him read his work on Bandcamp and on lp’s by The Gotobeds and Theremonster.
Rose Himber Howse is a queer writer from North Carolina. She’s currently a Wallace Stegner fellow in fiction at Stanford University and a Steinbeck fellow in fiction at San Jose State University. She earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Her work appears in Joyland, Hobart, The Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review, YES! Magazine, and elsewhere.
Week 5 of Pittsburgh’s 2021 Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series! Co-hosted and curated by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins.
About this event
White Whale Bookstore is thrilled and honored to help Joan E. Bauer and Kristofer Collins virtually host the 2021 Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series! Our lineup for Week 5 features Daniela Buccilli, Paola Corso, Jason Irwin, Rachel Mennies, and Fred Shaw.
Browse our whole ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don’t see on the sitethrough this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 6/29. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
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About the Hemingway’s Series:
The Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series was founded by Jimmy Cvetic in 1974 or thereabouts. It is co-hosted and curated by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins. You can RSVP to all the events in this series right here on our Eventbrite page or through www.whitewhalebookstore.com/events. An eight-week series on Tuesdays mostly, running May 4-August 10 @ 7 p.m. ET. Check out the audio archive of past series at www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com.
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About tonight’s writers:
Daniela Buccilli’s poetry can be found in South Dakota Review, Pennsylvania English, Coal River Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Cimarron Review. She has been anthologized a few times, including in the latest edition of Voices from the Attic. She co-edited the poetry anthology Show Us Your Papers. Her chapbook, What it Takes to Carry, was published by Main Street Rag. She reads for Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. She mentors for the Madwomen. She teaches high school.
Paola Corso’s books are set in her native Pittsburgh, where her Italian immigrant family members were steel workers, most recently Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Prize in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Awardee, and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories. She is cofounder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarded poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She splits her time between New York’s grid and Pittsburgh’s grade. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitors, Women’s Review of Books, U.S Catholic, The Progressive and other journals. For more, go to : http://www.paolacorso.com
Jason Irwin is the author of the three collections of poetry: The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag), A Blister of Stars (Low Ghost, 2016), Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008), & the chapbook Some Days It’s A Love Story (Slipstream Press, 2005). He has also had nonfiction published in IO Literary Journal, Cleaver Magazine, & The Crux. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY, and now lives in Pittsburgh. www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com
Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021), and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poety at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award.
Fred Shaw was named Emerging Poet Laureate Finalist for Allegheny County in 2020. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. His first collection, Scraping Away, was recently published by CavanKerry Press. He is a book reviewer and Poetry Editor for Pittsburgh Quarterly, and his poem, “Argot,” is featured in the 2018 full-length documentary, Eating & Working & Eating & Working. The film focuses on the lives of local service-industry workers. His poem “Scraping Away” was selected for the PA Public Poetry Project in 2017. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.
White Whale Bookstore is thrilled and honored to help Joan E. Bauer and Kristofer Collins virtually host the 2021 Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series! Our lineup for Week 4 features Jose Padua, Michael Simms, Matthew Ussia, and Bob Walicki.
Browse our whole ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don’t see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 6/15. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
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About the Hemingway’s Series:
The Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series was founded by Jimmy Cvetic in 1974 or thereabouts. It is co-hosted and curated by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins. You can RSVP to all the events in this series right here on our Eventbrite page or through www.whitewhalebookstore.com/events. An eight-week series on Tuesdays mostly, running May 4-August 10 @ 7 p.m. ET. Check out the audio archive of past series at www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com.
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About tonight’s writers:
Jose Padua’s first full length book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by former poet laureate Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is now out from the University of Arkansas Press . His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in publications such as Bomb, Salon.com, Beloit Poetry Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Unbearables, Another Chicago Magazine, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and others. He has written features and reviews for Salon, The Weeklings, NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail, and the New York Times, and has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets’ Café, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and many other venues. He was a featured reader at the 2012 Split This Rock poetry festival and won the New Guard Review’s 2014 Knightville Poetry Prize.
Born and raised in Texas, Michael Simms has worked as a squire to a Hungarian fencing master, a stable hand, a gardener, a forager, an estate agent, a college teacher, an editor, a publisher, a technical writer, a lexicographer, a political organizer, and a literary impresario. He identifies as being on the spectrum and as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t speak until he was five years old. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently American Ash, as well as four chapbooks, three novels and a textbook about poetry, and he’s been the lead editor of over 100 published books. As the founding editor of Vox Populi and the founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press and Coal Hill Review, he was recognized in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts. Simms and his wife Eva live in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Washington .
Matthew Ussia is a professor, editor, podcaster, thereminist, writer softcore punk, social media burnout and all-around sentient matter. He is a founding editor of the Beautiful Cadaver Project and co-edited their Social Justice Anthologies. His writings have appeared in Mister Rogers and Philosophy, Winedrunk Sidewalk, Future Humans in Fiction and Film, North of Oxford, and The Open Mic of the Air Podcast among others. He is co-editor of The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the Lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank and Recasting Masculinity. His Theremonster alter ego performs doom metal on a theremin. Matt sang back up on the Silence LP The Countdown’s Begun. He lives in Pittsburgh . More info: www.matthewussia.com.
Robert Walicki’s work has appeared in over 50 journals, including Pittsburgh City Paper, Fourth River ,Chiron Review, and Red River Review. A Pushcart and a Best of The Net nominee, Robert has published two chapbooks: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press), which was nominated to the 2016 List of Books for New York City ’s Poets House. His first full-length collection, Black Angels, is available from Pittsburgh’s Six Gallery Press.
Please register for this event by snagging a ticket on Eventbrite! There are both free tickets and pay-what-you-can tickets available. Registration will end at 6:30pm ET on 3/26.
Think you’ve got a bad job? Take consolation that you’re not scraping mold for a living, that you don’t have any tentacles in your head, and that you’re not sewing tents from the discarded skins of the creatures who’ve taken your world over. A wonderfully odd novella with a profoundly human core.
-Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and The Warren
At its best, Rick Claypool’s work makes the disturbing and surreal feel believable. The true horror in this book isn’t the alien overlords, but the alarmingly relatable journey of a man navigating a world he will never understand, willing to stoop ever lower just to get by.
-Daniel McCloskey, author of Cloud Town and A Film About Billy
Claypool’s post-apocalyptic novella draws readers into a world that’s compellingly surreal, darkly imaginative, and just not… quite right.
-Premee Mohamed, author of A Broken Darkness and Beneath the Rising
A character struggling between the twin horrors of alien invasion and economic degradation, I found Rick Claypool’s Mold Farmer a voice that held me in its grip. Full-on body horror merges with the most human of concerns – family, and how to protect it – to produce a fascinating, frightening tale.
-Aliya Whiteley, author of The Loosening Skin and The Beauty
Rick Claypool is the author of Leech Girl Lives (Spaceboy Books, 2017) and The Mold Farmer (Six Gallery Press, 2020). His short fiction appears here and there online and has been anthologized in Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, 2018) and The Future Will Be Written by Robots (Spaceboy Books, 2020). By day he works for Public Citizen researching corporate crime. He spent most of his life in Western Pennsylvania and now lives in Rhode Island, where he goes looking in the woods for fungi as frequently as he can.
Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of three collections of speculative short stories: The Jack Daniels Sessions EP (Six Gallery Press, 2010), Hard Times Blues (Six Gallery Press, 2013), and Dance on Saturday (Small Beer Press, 2020), a 2021 Philip K. Dick Award finalist. His work has appeared in Grist, Weird Fiction Review, Black Gate, The Southwestern Review, and Cabinet des Fées, among others. He was a core member of the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writers’ Cooperative in Pittsburgh, has toured across North America doing readings, and has curated many readings and reading series. Cotman holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Mills College.
Robert Isenberg is a freelance writer, playwright, photographer, stage performer, and documentary filmmaker. His books include The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage (Autumn House Press, 2010), Wander (Six Gallery Press, 2011), The Green Season (The Tico Times Publications, 2015), and three entries in the ongoing Adventures of Elizabeth Crowne series: The Mysterious Tongue of Dr. Vermillion (Backpack Media, 2015), The Woman in the Sky (2020), and Curse of the Qattara (2020). He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where he served as Whitford Fellow. Originally from Vermont, he lived in Pittsburgh for 16 years. For two years he lived in Costa Rica, where he served as a staff writer for The Tico Times. He freelances widely and teaches for numerous institutions, including Arizona State University. Isenberg now lives in Rhode Island, where he is a contributing editor for Providence Monthly.
Daniel McCloskey founded the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, a writers’ project which housed 45 writers from across the US and Canada and hosted hundreds of literary events. He is the author and illustrator of the prose/graphic novel hybrid A Film About Billy (Six Gallery Press, 2012), the comics Top of the Line (soon to appear in graphic novel form as Made Monsters) and Free Money, and the graphic novel Cloud Town (Abrams ComicArts, forthcoming). His work has been anthologized in BOTTOMS UP! True Tales of Hitting Rock-Bottom (Birdcage Bottom Books, 2017) and published on The Nib.
Excited to fête Paola Corso’s recent release, Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps this February! She’ll be joined by Karen Lillis, Angele Ellis, and Robert Walicki for a reading.
Check out a wide selection of titles on our ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don’t see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 2/26. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
Praise for Vertical Bridges:
“Under Corso’s nimble juggling of words and images, Pittsburgh’s staircases become a series of paths leading elsewhere-from China to Norway, from Italy back to the Three Rivers again. Together these narratives construct a fascinating ecology of urban spaces, emphasizing the delicate lives and quotidian strength of those who climb up and down: workers, immigrants, children, lovers. In each direction, these poetic flights offer an all-encompassing view.”
-LAURA E. RUBERTO, author of Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. and co-editor of New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 1 and 2
“I have expressed Pittsburgh’s city steps using maps and photographs. Here Paola Corso has done so with words and style, imagery and feelings. She offers a delightful way to experience the steps, not only in Pittsburgh but around the world.”
-BOB REGAN, author of Pittsburgh Steps and Bridges of Pittsburgh
“Pittsburghers will love Paola Corso’s mix of poetry and poetic imagery, from histories of the city’s staircases to stories that unfolded along them over time. It’s good to see the stairways being celebrated, preserved, and loved – in print and in real life.”
-BRIAN A. BUTKO, author of Greetings from the Lincoln Highway and editor of Western Pennsylvania History magazine
“In poems contemplative, lyric, hybrid, and explosive, Corso stays true to her working-class roots. Though the altitude is often dizzying, the elevation is well worth it-and the best of poems, like these, always give us a touch of vertigo. This is a remarkably imaginative book, replete with stunning archival photographs and equally stunning photographs by Corso herself. A marvel!”
-JOSEPH BATHANTI, author of The Life of the World to Come and East Liberty
About the writers:
Paola Corso‘s books are set in her native Pittsburgh, where her Italian immigrant family members were steel workers, most recently The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Prize in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Awardee, and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories. She is cofounder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarded poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She splits her time between New York’s grid and Pittsburgh’s grade.
Karen Lillis is a bookseller and the author of four novellas including Watch the Doors as They Close (Spuyten Duyvil) and The Second Elizabeth (Six Gallery Press). Find her work at Karen’s Book Row online.
Angele Ellis‘s haiku was featured on the marquee of the Harris Theatre after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in seventy publications and eighteen anthologies. She is the author of four books, two of which were published by Six Gallery Press—Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (2016), a fiction/poetry hybrid inspired by Pittsburgh, with photographs by Rebecca Clever, and Arab on Radar (2008), whose poems about her family and heritage won an Individual Fellowship in Poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Angele lives in Friendship, both a Pittsburgh neighborhood and a state of mind.
Robert Walicki‘s work has appeared in a number of journals including Fourth River, Uppagus, Vox Populi, and Chiron Review. He currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015), which was nominated to the 2016 New York Showcase of Books at The Poet’s House in NY. His first full-length collection of poems is Black Angels (Six Gallery Press, 2019) and his latest book, Fountain, was just released from Main Street Rag Press.
From the author of Leech Girl Lives comes a novella of cosmic claustrophobia and workplace survival horror. It’s the story of Thorner, crushed under the weight of an alien occupation and also a refrigerator; of his family and campmates and fellow workers on Weckett’s mold farm; of the nglaeylyaethm and their masks and pets. It’s the story of people in intolerable situations, faced with untenable choices, in an appallingly cruel society – a fanciful tale of the distant future.
Scifi/horror/weird fic writers weigh in:
Think you’ve got a bad job? Take consolation that you’re not scraping mold for a living, that you don’t have any tentacles in your head, and that you’re not sewing tents from the discarded skins of the creatures who’ve taken your world over. A wonderfully odd novella with a profoundly human core.
-Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and The Warren
At its best, Rick Claypool’s work makes the disturbing and surreal feel believable. The true horror in this book isn’t the alien overlords, but the alarmingly relatable journey of a man navigating a world he will never understand, willing to stoop ever lower just to get by.
-Daniel McCloskey, author of Cloud Town and A Film About Billy
Claypool’s post-apocalyptic novella draws readers into a world that’s compellingly surreal, darkly imaginative, and just not… quite right.
-Premee Mohamed, author of A Broken Darkness and Beneath the Rising
A character struggling between the twin horrors of alien in-vasion and economic degradation, I found Rick Claypool’s Mold Farmer a voice that held me in its grip. Full-on body horror merges with the most human of concerns-family, and how to protect it-to produce a fascinating, frightening tale.
-Aliya Whiteley, author of The Loosening Skin and The Beauty
So far it’s available from the usual suspects (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.), new-to-me outlets like Aladin, & good old bookshop.org. Ebooks too, for a change! Booksellers & libraries can order direct from Ingram.
Anyone uses goodreads, it’s also there & currently reviewless.
Learn more about Rick Claypool & his other work at his website.
Appreciate the city steps? Then you might also appreciate Paola Corso‘s new book.
In Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps, Paola Corso celebrates public stairways in her native Pittsburgh and around the world. Inspired by her Sicilian grandfather, a stonemason who built concrete steps, and her Calabrian grandfather and father, steelworkers who once climbed them to the mill, Corso is a storyteller. She shares memories of her family, the history behind Pittsburgh having more public staircases than any other city in the country, and curiosities about some of the world’s most famous steps. Vertical Bridges includes photos by the author along with archival photos from the University of Pittsburgh Library’s Pittsburgh City Photographer Collection.
Here’s what some other discerning step appreciators had to say about it:
“Under Corso’s nimble juggling of words and images, Pittsburgh’s staircases become a series of paths leading elsewhere—from China to Norway, from Italy back to the Three Rivers again. Together these narratives construct a fascinating ecology of urban spaces, emphasizing the delicate lives and quotidian strength of those who climb up and down: workers, immigrants, children, lovers. In each direction, these poetic flights offer an all-encompassing view.”
—LAURA E. RUBERTO, author of Gramsci, Migration, and the Representation of Women’s Work in Italy and the U.S. and co-editor of New Italian Migrations to the United States, Vol. 1 and 2
“I have expressed Pittsburgh’s city steps using maps and photographs. Here Paola Corso has done so with words and style, imagery and feelings. She offers a delightful way to experience the steps, not only in Pittsburgh but around the world.”
—BOB REGAN, author of Pittsburgh Steps and Bridges of Pittsburgh
“Pittsburghers will love Paola Corso’s mix of poetry and poetic imagery, from histories of the city’s staircases to stories that unfolded along them over time. It’s good to see the stairways being celebrated, preserved, and loved—in print and in real life.”
—BRIAN A. BUTKO, author of Greetings from the Lincoln Highway and editor of Western Pennsylvania History magazine
“In poems contemplative, lyric, hybrid, and explosive, Corso stays true to her working-class roots. Though the altitude is often dizzying, the elevation is well worth it—and the best of poems, like these, always give us a touch of vertigo. This is a remarkably imaginative book, replete with stunning archival photographs and equally stunning photographs by Corso herself. A marvel!”
—JOSEPH BATHANTI, author of The Life of the World to Come and East Liberty
So far it’s available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, bookshop.org, & probably elsewhere. Booksellers can get it direct from Ingram.
PAOLA CORSO’s books are set in her native Pittsburgh, where her Italian immigrant family members were steel workers, most recently The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Prize in Creative Writing, Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing, a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Awardee, and Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories. She is cofounder and resident artist of Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarded poetry and art project celebrating city steps. She splits her time between New York’s grid and Pittsburgh’s grade.
Here are some recent interviews Paola did with other authors about their books, over at CavanKerry Press
Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists Collective will hold its annual OPEN STUDIO TOUR on Friday-Sunday, November 6-8, 14-15, and 21-22, 2020 at Ossam Gallery and Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Gallery in Brooklyn. Paola will display her COLOR COLLAGES of city steps.
Paola will be a featured reader for the Italian American Writers Association via Zoom on Saturday, March 27, 2021. There will be an Open Mic from 6-7 p.m. and Featured Readers 7-8 p.m. More details to come.
The Carnegie Public Library-Oakmont Branch will exhibit Paola’s PHOTOGRAPHS of city steps and color collages the month of July 2021 along with a poetry reading and book signing. More details to come.
Stay tuned for reviews & more (online, for the foreseeable future) events & updates, including a reading hosted by Pittsburgh’s White Whale Bookstore in February.
Please register for this event by snagging a ticket on Eventbrite! There are both free tickets and pay-what-you-can tickets available. Registration will end at 6:30pm ET on 11/20.
Tune in for a poetry reading with local (or formerly local but still local in our hearts) poets Lauren Russell, Emily Mohn-Slate, Sharon Fagan McDermott, and Bob Walicki!
Lauren Russell’s first full-length book, What’s Hanging on the Hush, came out from Ahsahta Press in 2017. Her second book, Descent, is a winner of the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards and came out from Tarpaulin Sky Press in June, 2020.
Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of The Falls, winner of the 2019 New American Poetry Prize (New American Press, 2020) and Feed, winner of the 2018 Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press).
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private school in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent poetry collection, Life Without Furniture, was published by Jacar Press in 2018.
Robert Walicki currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015. His first full length collection of poems, Black Angels, (Six Gallery Press, 2019).
Six Gallery Press 