2/27 The Bridge Series w/ Friend, Goldman, Kothari & Casa San Jose @ Ace Hotel

7PM, LAST WEDNESDAY OF FEBRUARY, the Bridge Series is back in a new spot.

We are happy to kick off season three of The Bridge Series at the Ace Hotel on Wedneday Feburary 27. Our featured organization will be Casa San Jose with readers Malcolm Friend, Pam Goldman and Geeta Kothari.

$5 suggested donation

Thanks to our board members Ellen McGrath Smith and Cameron Barnett for putting this event together.

Bio details to follow

Casa San José is a Pittsburgh-based community resource center that advocates for and empowers Latinos by promoting integration and self-sufficiency. Opened in 2013 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, Case San José has helped over 1,000 immigrants navigate the legal, health care, and social service systems to thrive in their new home. Representing this agency will be Sister Janice Vanderneck, Case San José’s director of Civic Engagement.

Pam Goldman is a fiction writer living in Pittsburgh. Her story, “Partisan,” is coming out in the spring issue of Colorado Review. She is also an activist and people’s lawyer who has worked
with the Mud Creek, KY community in obtaining a functioning water system; Iranian students protesting against the Shah; striking coal miners; people with AIDS, early in the epidemic; prisoners serving excessive sentences of the mass incarceration system; prisoners fighting for their rights while incarcerated; political prisoners in the high security unit of the Lexington federal prison; battered women, before shelters existed; activists from Standing Rock. Today,
she is a volunteer at Casa San José. Between 1980 and 1981, she spent almost every waking moment of helping 287 Haitian refugees who had fled the vicious regime of Baby Doc Duvalier and who were incarcerated in federal prison in Lexington, KY. The Haitians sought to remain in the United States and apply for political asylum and, of course, to be released from prison.

Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, WA. 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, 2018), selected by Cynthia Arrieu-King as winner of the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize. He is also a member of the Afrocaribbean poetry duo Black Plantains with JR Mahung.

Geeta Kothari is the nonfiction editor of the Kenyon Review. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Best American Essays. Her short story collection, I Brake for Moose and Other Stories was published in 2017, and she is a recipient of a 2018 Creative Development Grant sponsored by The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation.