7/30 Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series – Season Finale!

Don Wentworth sez,

I’ll be reading this coming Tuesday, July 30th, at 8 pm, at the Hemingway’s summer finale. The poets reading will try to put an exclamation point to what has been, arguably, the best season at Hem’s to date. My contribution will be 8 new haiku and 2 ghazals I have not read there before. Also a bonus free verse poem in which, seance-like, we will be attempting communication with Philip Larkin on the other side. Details below. Hope to see you there.

The 2019 Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. May-July
Hemingway’s Cafe, 3911 Forbes Avenue , Oakland
Founded by Jimmy Cvetic.
Co-hosted by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins
Open mic after featured readings as time permits

Tuesday July 30 – The Grand Finale curated by Kristofer Collins. Jen Ashburn, Jason Baldinger, Deena November, Deesha Philyaw, Adriana Ramirez, Ellen McGrath Smith, Meghan Tutolo & Don Wentworth

Jen Ashburn is the author of The Light on the Wall (Main Street Rag, 2016) and has work published in numerous venues, including the podcast 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 , where she taught creative writing to women in the Allegheny County Jail through Chatham ’s Words Without Walls program. She’s currently working on her second full-length poetry collection, tentatively titled Our Own Thin Ways, and a memoir.

Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A recent Writer in Residence and Osage Arts Community, he has three recent books, This Useless Beauty (Alien Buddha Press) and the split books The Ugly Side of the Lake with John Dorsey (Night Ballet Press) as well as Little Fires Hiding with James Benger (Kung Fu Treachery Press). His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp on lps by the band Theremonster and The Gotobeds.

Deena November is the author of Mean Mama (Main Street Rag, 2017) She has edited two anthologies, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres (Lascaux Editions, 2017) and I Just Hope It’s Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Her poetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Women Write Resistance, Keyhole Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her chapbook Dick Wad was published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2012. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Carlow University where she then taught in the English and Women’s Studies programs. Deena teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Communications at Robert Morris University. She curates the Staghorn Poetry Series. Deena enjoys strolling through the gardens of Phipps with her toddlers and baby.

Deesha Philyaw is a Pittsburgh-based writer. Her fiction and nonfiction writing on race, gender, sex and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, The Cheat River Review, The Baltimore Review, dead housekeeping, Bitch, Apogee Journal, and other publications. She’s a Fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a native Floridian.

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh . She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and in 2016 she was named Critic at Large for the Los Angeles Times Book Section. Her essays and poems have also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, Literary Hub, Convolution, HEArt, Apogee, and on Nerve.com. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she cofounded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron , and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her book, Nobody’s Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press.

Meghan Tutolo is an artist and copywriter from Pittsburgh , PA. When she isn’t writing romance for olives and pasta or grading essays, she can be found cruising around on her pipsqueak motorcycle or holed up at home with her smoothy faced cats—writing and making things. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Weave, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy and Free State Review—among others. Her first chapbook, Little As Living, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.

Don Wentworth’s work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in every day life. His poetry has appeared in Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Rolling Stone, as we l as a number of anthologies. He is the author of
three full-length poetry collections published by Six Gallery Press: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016). Past All Traps was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. His poem “hiding” was selected as one of “100 Notable Haiku” of 2013 by Modern Haiku Press. Don has two new poetry books forthcoming: a collection of ghazals from Low Ghost and a collaborative collection of tanka written with the British haiku poet, Joy McCall. Since 1989, he has been the editor and publisher of Lilliput Review.

Listen in @ www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com (our audio archive)

Follow us: https://www.facebook.com/Hemingwayssummerpoetryseries/

2/7 Poetry & Music Night to Benefit HIAS @ Irma Freeman Center

7PM THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7…

Please bring a donation, suggested $10 – $20.

Join us as we voice our support for HIAS and for refugees, our friends. The event will be filled with the words and songs of 11 poets and musicians Avi Diamond and Angela Autumn – all local to Pittsburgh. The evening will start with a brief introduction by hosts Laura, Valerie, and Deena, as well as by director Leslie Aizenman and volunteer coordinator Andrew Van Treeck of JFCS Immigrant & Refugee Services.

Poets: Celeste Gainey, Phil Terman, Bob Walicki, Ava Anne C. Cipri, Angele Ellis, Marina Lopez, Deena November, and Valerie Bacharach.

Galleries: “Impressions & Found Work” by Irma Freeman (Upper Gallery) and “neshama – paintings & installation” by Laura Rosner (Lower Gallery)

On October 27th, 2018, the tragic mass shooting at Tree of Life *Or L’Simcha Congregation occurred, and 11 precious lives were lost during Shabbat morning services. The perpetrator was in part motivated by the congregation’s philanthropic work to benefit the Hebrew International Aid Society (HIAS), an American-Jewish organization established in 1881 to assist Jewish refugees. HIAS has since expanded its outreach to non-Jewish refugees fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Tunisia, Vietnam, and the successor states to the former Soviet Union. The organization’s goal is to help refugees escape persecution and to resettle in safety.

Lots of love, and hope to share this night with you.

4/15 Schubert on the Bluff, Year 3: Concert XIII: Winter Journey @ Mary Pappert School of Music

SUNDAY…

2:30 p.m. Pre-concert

David Allen Wehr plays Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque and L’isle joyeuse

3:00 p.m. Concert

A co-presentation with Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, Benjamin Binder, Artistic Director

Schubert was most famous during his lifetime for his over 600 songs, some of which were grouped into cycles. Perhaps the most important of these is the death-haunted “Winterreise”, a journey into winter’s darkness many music lovers consider Schubert’s finest achievement in song. Vocal expert Benjamin Binder is joined by acclaimed baritone Daniel Teadt. Winter is coming!

With its themes of alienation, exile, obsession, and lost love, Winterreise speaks to our current social and political moment in moving and startling ways. In addition to a complete, uninterrupted performance of the entire cycle, six Pittsburgh poets (Jen Ashburn, Sheila Carter-Jones, Lori Jakiela, Adriana E. Ramirez, Sheila Squillante, and Don Wentworth) will give readings of new work responding to the songs.

1/7 ACLU Benefit feat. Baldinger, Brice, Collins, Friend, Lourette, & Ramírez @ White Whale

THIS SATURDAY…

Join local poets Kris Collins, Adriana Ramirez, Malcolm Friend, Jason Baldinger, Nicole Lourette, and Charlie Brice for a reading to help raise funds for the ACLU.

For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

Whether it’s achieving full equality for LGBT people, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age of widespread government surveillance, ending mass incarceration, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach.

With more than 1 million members, activists, and supporters, the ACLU is a nationwide organization that fights tirelessly in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., to safeguard everyone’s rights.

BIOS:

Kristofer Collins is the books editor of Pittsburgh magazine and the publisher of Low Ghost Press. He lives in Stanton heights with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson.

Adriana E. Ramírez is a 2015 PEN/Fusion Award-winning nonfiction writer, storyteller, digital maker, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, co-runs the Steel City Poetry Slam, and co-founded Aster(ix) Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Convolution, HEArt, Apogee, and Nerve.com, as well as on hundreds of stages across the country. Ramirez is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Swallows (Blue Sketch Press) and Trusting in Imaginary Spaces (Tired Hearts Press); she is also the nonfiction editor of DISMANTLE (Thread Makes Blanket Press).

Nicole Lourette is a poet and event planner from Rochester, NY. She now lives here in Pittsburgh, PA after graduating with her MFA from Chatham University. She travels both for work and her own sanity as often as possible and manages to write, but never finish travel essays years after the fact. Her work has been featured in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, IDK Magazine and Vagabond City Journal.

Charlie Brice is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos, published by WordTech Editions (2016), and a card carrying member of the ACLU. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, Chiron Review, The Pittsburgh Poetry Review and elsewhere.

Malcolm Friend is a poet and CantoMundo fellow originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, and is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including La Respuestamagazine, the Fjords Review’s Black American Edition, Vinyl, Word Riot, The Acentos Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, and Pretty Owl Poetry.

Jason Baldinger has spent a life in odd jobs. He’s traveled the country, and wrote a few books, The latest of which “The Lower 48” (Six Gallery Press) and the chapbook “The Studs Terkel Blues” (Night Ballet Press) are available now. A short list of recent publishing credits include: Uppagus, Anti Heroin Chic, In-between Hangovers, Your One Phone Call and Lilliput Review. You can also hear audio of some poems on the bandcamp website by just typing in his name.