3/3 Karen’s Book Row @ Spirit; Allen, Clevenger, Dorsey, Jakiela, & Powers @ White Whale

Busy day! Karen Lillis sez

Karen’s Book Row will be at the Pittsburgh Flea this Sunday, March 3!
11am to 4pm
SPIRIT LOUNGE
Lawrenceville
242 51st Street off Butler St
FREE admission
Downstairs: Buffet brunch & bar
Upstairs: Flea market including records, vintage clothes, and local handmade items (jewelry, art, specialty foods)
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/769539150086973/

Stop by for your snowstorm reads, collectibles, and literary must-haves!

Re: this 4PM White Whale reading Jason Baldinger, who will host it, sez

John Dorsey and Nikki Allen are back in town and Missouri poets Jeanette Powers and Victor Clevenger will be joining them and that seemed like a good enough reason have a reading! Rounding out the bill will be Lori Jakiela. This is an early show and we will be passing the hat for gas money for out of towners.

Nikki Allen is a lover & a writer—with hair an animal & heart clumsy tiger. Scribbling because she must with nearly 20 years of stages in her gut. She has read in cities across the US at music festivals, war protests, backyards and art openings. Her work has appeared in Nailed, Crash, The New Yinzer, out of nothing, Profane Journal(Pushcart Prize nominee ‘14/’15) and Encyclopedia Destructica among others. Allen has also contributed vocals to tracks by recording artists Poogie Bell (Question Song) and Jack Wilson (NYC). She believes in revolution, strong coffee, the hard knocks & the sweetness.

When not traveling the highways across America, Victor Clevenger spends his days in a Madhouse and his nights writing poetry. He lives with his second ex-wife, and together they raise six children in a small town northeast of Kansas City, MO. Selected pieces of his work have appeared in print magazines and journals around the world, as well as at a variety of places online. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, as well as the Pushcart Prize. Victor’s most recent published collections of poetry include a split book with Tom Farris titled Ginger Roots Are Best Taken Orally (EMP, 2018), A Finger in the Hornets’ Nest (Red Flag Poetry, 2018), and On The Tip Of Our Tongues (Analog Submission Press, 2018). He can be reached at: facebook.com/thepoetvictorclevenger

John Dorsey has been writing poetry since the late 1980’s and has been involved in the publishing community for more than two decades. He is the author of around 50 books and chapbooks, a few of the most recent being Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017), the latter was funded by Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s English Department. An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has appeared more than 2,000 magazines and anthologies from around the world. He has read or spoken at colleges and universities such as the University of Toledo, Assumption College, Cleveland State University, Seton Hill University, University of the Arts, Erie Community College, Southeast Missouri State University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, as well as other assorted venues covering 49 states. For several years Dorsey served as a judge for the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo’s Art in Tarta Project, which chose poems to be presented on city transit buses. In 2006, he won the Toledo City Paper’s annual poetry and fiction competition, and would go on to serve as a judge the following year, before being named the city’s Best Literary Artist in their 2014 reader poll. In 2010, he also served as a judge for Grievous Jones Press’ Grievous Prize issued in Cardiff, Wales, and in 2013 for the Standing Rock Cultural Arts Open Chapbook Competition in Kent, Ohio. From 2003-2012, he served as an Artist-in-Residence at the Collingwood Arts Center in Toledo, Ohio and In 2015, Dorsey was awarded a Visiting Artist Residency by the Osage Arts Community in Belle, MO, where he currently resides. In 2017 he received a two appointment to serve as Belle’s first city Poet Laureate from Mayor Steve Vogt and has gone on to found the city’s first literary publication the Gasconade Review, which he edits with Jason Ryberg. He is a graduate of the University of Arts’ Writing for Film and Television program, completing his education there in 2002, and 2017 he served as the subject for a poetry documentary by NYC filmmaker Carson Parish. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com

Jeanette Powers is a poet-artist working on the banks of the Gasconade River in the Northern Ozarks. They are a founding member of FountainVerse: KC small press poetry fest and Stubborn Mule Press, as well as having seven full-length books of poetry and some chapbooks too released over the last decade. Follow them at jeanettepowers.com or @novel_cliche

Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Atticus Books), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazine and Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Literary Award, and named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Books of Nonfiction of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Jakiela is the author of an essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker (Bottom Dog Press), as well as two other memoirs — Miss New York Has Everything (Hatchette) and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious (C&R Press). She is also the author of the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist (Turning Point) and several limited-edition poetry chapbooks. Her latest poetry chapbook, Big Fish, was published by Stranded Oak Press in 2016. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity and more. Her essays have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize many times, and she received the 2015 City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize, which sent her to Brussels, Belgium on a month-long writing residency. She has also received a Golden Quill Award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, was a working-scholar at The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and was the winner of the first-ever Pittsburgh Literary Death Match. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, the writer Dave Newman, and their children. A former flight attendant and journalist, she now directs the undergraduate writing program at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, where she is Professor of English and Creative/Professional Writing. She is a co-director of Chautauqua Institution’s Summer Writers Festival, teaches community writing workshops at a yoga studio in her hometown of Trafford, Pa., and curates the Saturday Poem feature at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is at work on her first novel.