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/

12/6 Bill of Rights Day reading/ACLU benefit @ White Whale

Don Wentworth says,

Thursday, December 6th, at 7pm at White Whale Bookstore (thanks Jill & Adlai!), I will be participating in the reading listed below, which is a benefit for the ACLU. The stated goal of the reading “involves solidarity, camaraderie, free expression, holiday spirit and hope for the future.  And yes, we could all use some good cheer.” The work I’ll be reading – a ghazal, two lyric poems, and a handful of haiku – will try to touch all those bases

It is an honor to be part of this event with its amazing array of top notch poets. We will each be reading for a maximum of 7-8 minutes and Joan, as always, will keep things moving. Books by all the poets will be available to purchase and, if you haven’t seen White Whale’s stock of poetry, as well as fiction, non-fiction, and children’s items, now is the perfect time.

BILL OF RIGHTS READING

Thursday, December 6, 2018, 7 pm @ White Whale Bookstore Join us in support of Freedom of Expression and the Bill of Rights

A Benefit for the ACLU / Co-hosted by Joan E. Bauer & Emily Mohn-Slate. There is a suggested donation of $5 but all our welcome regardless. Our readers will be: 

   

Cameron Barnett                        Adriana Ramirez

Sheila Carter-Jones                   Mike Schneider

Malcolm Friend                          Justin Vicari

Celeste Gainey                           Arlene Weiner 

Joy Katz                                      Don Wentworth 

I hope to see you there.

best,

Don

 

Cameron Barnett holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge, and co-coordinator of Pitt’s Speakeasy Reading Series. He teaches middle school at Falk Laboratory School, and is an associate poetry editor for Pittsburgh Poetry Review. His first collection, The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water (Autumn House Press, 2018), was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.

 

Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep selected by Elizabeth Alexander as the 2012 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award and the chapbook Blackberry Cobbler Song. Her chapbook Crooked Star Dreambook was named Honorable Mention for the 2013 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. Sheila is a fellow of Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the 2015 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been described by Herbert Woodward Martin as one who writes with “immediacy of tone, voice and language.”

 

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 theUniversity of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017), and has received awards and fellowships from organizations including CantoMundo, VONA/Voices of Our Nations, Backbone Press, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and the University of Memphis. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including La Respuesta magazine, Vinyl, Word Riot, The Acentos Review, and Pretty Owl Poetry. His first full-length book of poetry, Our Brusies Kept Singing Purple, the winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize, was published by the Inlandia Institute in 2018.

Celeste Gainey is the author of the full-length poetry collection, the GAFFER (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2015), and the chapbook In the land of speculation & seismography (Seven Kitchens Press, 2011), runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize. The first woman to be admitted to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) as a gaffer, she has spent many years working with light in film and architecture. www.celestegainey.com

 

Joy Katz is an American poet and writer. Her work in progress, White: An Abstract, documents every minute of whiteness in her life. She has three poetry collections—All You Do is Perceive, a National Poetry Series finalist and a Stahlecker Selection at Four Way Books, The Garden Room (Tupelo), and Fabulae (SIU)—plus a chapbook, Which From That Time (Argos Books). With Kevin Prufer, she co-edited the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (University of Illinois). She has received grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Heinz Foundation, and the NEA, as well as a Wallace Stegner fellowship. She teaches in CarlowUniversity’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops and in Chatham University’s MFA program and is an editor-at-large for Copper Nickel. She lives in Pittsburgh.

 

Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian nonfiction writer, storyteller, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She’s the winner of the 2015 PEN/Fusion Emerging Writer’s Prize, for her nonfiction novella, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). In 2016, she was named “Critic At Large” by the Los Angeles Times’ Book Section. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica/ PEN America, Convolution, HEArt, Apogee, and Nerve.com. She is the author of two small-press poetry books—The Swallows (Blue Sketch Press, reissued 2016) and Trusting in Imaginary Spaces (Tired Hearts Press, 2010)—as well as the nonfiction editor of DISMANTLE (Thread Makes Blanket Press, 2014). Ramírez co-founded Aster(ix) Journal in 2013 with novelist Angie Cruz. Aster(ix) is a literary arts journal dedicated to social justice, as well as giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she co-founded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective (home of the Steel City Slam) and the infamous Nasty Slam, while continuing to perform on stages around the country. She was featured in the 2014 Legends of Poetry Slam Showcase and TEDxHouston, as well as the 2016 Three Rivers Arts Festival. Her debut full-length nonfiction book, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner (2018).

 

Mike Schneider has published poems in many literary journals, including New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review and Poetry. He received the 2012 Editors Award in Poetry from The Florida Review, and won the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press, which in 2017 published his chapbook, How Many Faces Do You Have?

 

Justin Vicari  has won awards from Third Coast, New Millennium Writings, and Plan B Press.  His first collection of poems, The Professional Weepers (Pavement Saw, 2011), received the Transcontinental Award. He has also authored several books of literary, film and philosophical theory, including Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival (McFarland, 2001), Nicholas Winding Rfn and the Violence of Art (McFarland, 2014), and Japanese Film an the Floating Mind: Cinematic Contemplations of Being (McFarland, 2016)  He is also a translator of Paul Eluard, Jean Sénac, J.-K. Huysmans, Francoise Emmanuel and Octava Mirbeau.  His second full-length book of poetry, In Search of Lost Joy, was published by Main Street Rag in 2018.

 

Arlene Weiner is the author of two poetry collections: City Bird (Ragged Sky, 2016) and Escape Velocity (Ragged Sky, 2006), of which Poet Joy Katz wrote, “I want to keep my favorite of these beautifully alert, surprising poems with me as I grow old.” A MacDowell Colony fellow in 2008, Arlene has been a Shakespeare scholar, a cardiology technician, a college instructor, an editor, and a research associate in educational applications of cognitive science. Her poetry has been published in journals including Off the Coast, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and U.S. 1 Worksheets, anthologized, and read by Garrison Keillor on his Writer’s Almanac. She also writes plays. Her play Findings was produced by Pittsburgh Playwrights Company in March 2017.

 

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.

 

2/22 The Bridge Series: Tony Norman, Adriana Ramirez, & Jan Beatty @ Brillobox

8PM THIS WEDNESDAY…

The Bridge Series unites the Pittsburgh literary and activist communities to raise awareness and funds for local organizations fighting the good fight in these troubling times.

The series convenes the last Wednesday of each month at The Brillobox. Each installment will feature Pittsburgh’s finest writers and a special guest organization (with proceeds from the evening going directly to that organization).

Plus every evening will end with a short Open Mic segment!

Tonight will feature readings from:

Tony Norman – Associate Editor / Columnist / Book Review Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Adriana Ramirez – a Mexican-Colombian nonfiction writer, storyteller, digital maker, and performance poet. her nonfiction novella, Dead Boys, was published by Little A (November 2016), and her debut full-length nonfiction book, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner (Fall 2017).

Jan Beatty – worked as a waitress for fifteen years, and as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and a social worker and teacher in maximum-security prisons. She is the managing editor of MadBooks, a small press that has published a series of books and chapbooks by women writers. For twenty years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WESA-FM featuring national writers. Jan Beatty directs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops at Carlow University, where she is also director of creative writing and teaches in the low-residency MFA program. Her latest book is Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Our guest organization tonight is Be Well! Pittsburgh and Jude Vachon will be onhand to discuss its mission.

Be Well Pittsburgh! collaborates with health care consumers, health care providers, social service providers and community organizations to improve uninsured Pittsburghers’ awareness of and access to health care resources.

Be Well! was founded in 2005 and was originally funded by a Seed Award from the Sprout Fund. The Seed Award supported the printing of 6,000 copies of a resource booklet entitled Be Well! Healthcare Options for the Uninsured. The booklet was distributed in public venues and through social service organizations in Pittsburgh. Its release was launched at a community health fair at the Quiet Storm Coffeehouse during the summer of 2006.

Be Well! continues to revise, update, print and distribute the booklets as funds allow. We also continually revise and update the website. We act as a reference source to individuals and service providers, participate in community events, and hold community information sessions on health care resources for uninsured people. www.bewellpgh.org

Thanks to Krisofer Collins & Jason Baldinger for organizing this great new series!