7 PM WEDNESDAY
For our June installment of The Bridge Series our guest organization will be Bethlehem Haven and our readers will include Jen Ashburn, Jill Khoury and Toi Derricotte.
$5 suggested donation
thanks to our board members Joan Bauer and Jenny Ashburn for putting this event together.
Bio details below:
Jen Ashburn is the author of The Light on the Wall (Main Street Rag, 2016) and has work published in numerous venues, including The MacGufffin, Whiskey Island and The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Her poem “Our Mother Drove Barefoot” was selected for the 2018 Public Poetry Project by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and distributed on posters across the state. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, and lives in Pittsburgh.
Jill Khoury writes on gender, disability, and embodied identity. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal that features poetry and art of the body. She has written two chapbooks—Borrowed Bodies (Pudding House, 2009) and Chance Operations (Paper Nautilus, 2016). Her debut full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer, was released in 2016 from Sundress Publications. Find her at jillkhoury.com.
Toi Derricotte is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently, The Undertaker’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), described by Natasha Trethewey as “a courageous act of healing and redemption.” An earlier collection of poems, Tender, won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; and her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton), received the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, the nation’s premier “home for Black poetry.” Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, she serves on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors. Her sixth collection, ‘I’: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019.
ABOUT OUR GUEST ORGANIZATION:
Bethlehem Haven provides shelter and supportive services to thousands of homeless women. A continuum of care consists of a range of housing and supportive services designed to enable each woman to identify her needs, develop a plan of action, and achieve a successful outcome.
Bethlehem Haven believes that a secure home is an essential foundation for women to achieve stable mental and physical health, as well as personal empowerment. Every woman who lives at Bethlehem Haven is linked to supportive services, specially designed for their individual needs. Bethlehem Haven helps clients identify an action plan to achieve self-sufficiency and permanent housing.
Housing Programs and Supportive Services
EMERGENCY SHELTER provides temporary housing for homeless women.
SAFE AT HOME offers monetary and basic assistance to women who are homeless, or at immediate risk of homelessness, for the first time in their lives. Priority is given to women over 50 years old.
HAVEN HOMES provides supportive permanent housing for women who are mentally ill.
RAPID RE-HOUSING provides housing identification, move in assistance, short-term rental assistance that is gradually reduced as the tenant assumes a larger share of the payment, case management and aftercare support.
MEDICAL RESPITE CARE is acute and post-acute medical care for patients experiencing homelessness or patients who are unstably housed who are too ill or frail from a physical illness or injury while living in a shelter or on the street, but are not sic enough to be in a hospital.
MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS CLINIC provides medical, mental health, podiatry, and dental care for homeless women and men without health insurance
UPTOWN LEGAL CLINIC provides free legal counseling for civil cases in such areas as family law, landlord-tenant, public benefits, consumer protection, wills, power of attorney and bankruptcy.
For the last 36 years, Bethlehem Haven has provided nearly 13,000 nights of shelter, every night, and the need continues to grow. Each year, the Haven provides nearly 60,000 meals; sees around 600 men and women in the health and wellness clinic; fills countless physical and emotional needs for our residents and day program attendees; and provides employment training for more than 100 men and women in the community.
ALSO 7 PM WEDNESDAY
Join Pretty Owl Poetry at The Black Cat Market for a night of poetry + fiction + cats! Wheeler Light will be promoting their book Hometown Onomastics! Local readers Laura Brun, Malcolm Friend, and Taylor Grieshober will be reading things, too!
Laura Brun is a poet from small-town Kentucky who lives and writes in Pittsburgh. She currently works at the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and reads submissions for IDK Magazine. Her work is most recently forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue and the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. You can find more of her work at lauranbrun.blogspot.com and can follow her on insta @laurarrrrun
Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (Inlandia Books, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. Together with JR Mahung, he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afrocarribean poetry collective.
Taylor Grieshober earned her MFA in Fiction from Oregon State University in 2018. She has recently been shortlisted for the Master’s Review Emerging Writer’s Prize, guest judged by Aimee Bender and her work has appeared in Hobart and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. Her debut story collection, “Off Days,” is forthcoming from Low Ghost Press on June 8th.
Wheeler Light lives in Washington, DC. He received his BA in creative writing from Naropa University in Boulder, CO, where he co-founded What Are Birds? Journal. He is the 2018 Denver Mercury Cafe Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the IthacaLit Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in December Magazine, Gravel Mag, Hobart, and New Delta Review, among others. He is the author of Blue Means Snow (Bottlecap Press 2018) and Hometown Onomastics (Pitymilk Press 2019).
Six Gallery Press 