3/23 & 4/13 Pittsburgh Poets Rock the Apollo 2 @ Apollo Memorial Library

Two readings by Pittsburgh poets at the Apollo Memorial Library, each featuring four poets and a mid-reading OPEN MIC for local poets! FREE!!

**FRIDAY, MARCH 23**

A seventh-generation Pittsburgher, JAY CARSON taught creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he was a faculty advisor to the student literary journal, Rune. He has published more than 100 poems in national literary and professional journals, magazines, and anthologies. Jay published a chapbook, Irish Coffee, with Coal Hill Review and a longer book of his poems, The Cinnamon of Desire, with Main Street Rag. He considers his work Appalachian, Irish, accessible, the problem-solving spiritual survival of a raging, youth—and just what you might need.

BRI GRIFFITH studies Creative Writing at Carlow University, where she’s a proud member of the Madwomen in the Attic. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Alien Mouth, Rogue Agent, Maudlin House, and Pittsburgh City Paper’s online feature Chapter & Verse.

SHARON FAGAN McDERMOTT is a poet, musician, and literature teacher at Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and Slipstream, among other journals, and in numerous anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press) and A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play (Sarabande Books). She has received a PA Council on the Arts Grant, a Pittsburgh Foundation Artist Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Her most recent chapbook, Bitter Acoustic, was selected by poet Betty Adcock as the winner of the 2011 Jacar Press chapbook contest.

ROBERT WALICKI’s work has appeared in over 50 journals, including Pittsburgh City Paper, Fourth River, Stone Highway 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 forthcoming from Six Gallery Press.

**FRIDAY, APRIL 13**

DANIELA BUCCILLI’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Cimarron Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, U.S. Worksheets 1, Free State Review, Quail Bell.com, and Italian Americana. She holds an MFA in fiction from Pitt, and is currently working on a poetry MFA at Carlow. She is a member of The Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and teaches public high school outside of Pittsburgh. Her poetry manuscript All She Is Willing has been short-listed in a few contests, but, alas, has not been published. Nonetheless, she persists.

Over the past two decades, REBECCA CLEVER has served as a reporter, newspaper editor, columnist, promotional and technical writer, book editor/designer and photographer. Her poetry, nonfiction, interviews and pictures have been published in various newspapers, literary journals, books and anthologies. She is a past recipient of the Laurie Mansell Reich poetry award, co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and Chatham University; she was the recipient of a residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the AWP Intro Journals Project. Rebecca received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham in 2011, where she was a finalist for best thesis. She resides in the Greater Pittsburgh area with her partner, Theresa, their children, and nine pets.

ANGELE ELLIS’s most recent book, Under the Kaufmann’s Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh, with photos by Rebecca Clever (Six Gallery Press), is a hybrid valentine to her adopted city. A longtime editor and community activist, she also is the author of Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook) and Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems won her a fellowship from the PA Council on the Arts. Angele is a contributing editor to Al Jadid Magazine; her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in 75 journals and anthologies. Her latest manuscript, Fallout Shelter, was a first-round finalist in the 2017 Two Sylvias Chapbook Contest.

LISA PANEPINTO is the author of On This Borrowed Bike (Three Rooms Press) and Poetry Editor for Cabildo Quarterly, a literary broadside and online journal.