12/8 7th Annual Holiday Book Sale @ Spirit

THIS SUNDAY, NOON-5…

Are you ready? Pittsburgh’s Holiday Book Sale returns, at a new venue! Spirit Hall in Lawrenceville gives us room for twice as many booksellers, a wider book selection, & one of the most popular brunches in town. Stop by to browse new books, used books, collectible books, new releases, gift-ready blank books, SALE BOOKS, fiction, poetry, scifi, memoir, graphic novels, children’s books, Pittsburgh books, & more! Books in every price range, plus cocktails & a holiday soundtrack. Join us!!

Details:
FREE admission
Free Parking
SPIRIT HALL
51st Street in Lawrenceville
Cross street–Butler Street
*Just off the Butler Street Cookie Crawl! (Joy of Cookies Tour)

This year’s Holiday Book Sale vendors include:

Karen’s Book Row
Copacetic Comics
Amazing Books
City of Asylum Bookstore
Air & Nothingness Press
Autumn House Press
Book ‘Em
Books Like Bread
Creative Nonfiction
Do Not Destroy Books
Eulalia Books
Low Ghost Press
Power City Books (new!)
Vers Libris
Very Important Books
Winter Pickle Press
and more!

Pittsburgh’s 7th Annual Holiday Book Sale features some of Pittsburgh’s most ecclectic indie bookstores and book dealers: To date, we have TEN returning booksellers and EIGHT new booksellers!

Our new location of SPIRIT HALL means
>>More booksellers
>>>>buffet brunch downstairs (11am-3pm)
>>>cocktails and cash bar (in the same room with the Book Sale)

Join us!!

5/31 Hot Jewels by Chuck Kinder launch @ City of Asylum

8PM THURSDAY, MAY 31…

Join us for the book launch of Hot Jewels, Chuck Kinder’s second collection of poetry on Six Gallery Press, and a celebration of the author’s life and work. Chuck will be here via Skype, with other poets taking the Alphabet City stage for a series of live poetry readings.

Other Featured Writers:
Scott Silsbe
Michael Simms
Lori Jakiela
Sharon Fagan McDermott
Dave Newman
Micki Myers
Toi Derricotte

Chuck Kinder is the author of four novels—Snakehunter, The Silver Ghost, Honeymooners, and Last Mountain Dancer—and three collections of poetry—Imagination Motel, All That Yellow, and Hot Jewels.

Kinder was born and raised in West Virginia. He received a BA and MA in English from West Virginia University, where he wrote the first creative writing thesis in school history, which evolved into his first novel, Snakehunter. He later caught a Greyhound and headed west to join friends living in San Francisco.

In 1971 Kinder was awarded the Edith Mirrielees Writing Fellowship to Stanford University, followed by the Jones Lectureship in Fiction Writing. He has been a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Davis, and at the University of Alabama, and he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Yaddo’s Dorothy and Granville Hicks Fellowship.

At Stanford, Kinder became close friends with fellow students Raymond Carver, Scott Turow, and Larry McMurtry. His relationship with Carver inspired Honeymooners. His struggle to complete this book inspired the character Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.

As a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for more than three decades, Kinder served as the director of the creative writing program and helped foster the careers of Michael Chabon, Earl H. McDaniel, Chuck Rosenthal, Gretchen Moran Laskas, and Keely Bowers.

He now lives in Key Largo, Florida, with Diane Cecily, his wife of over forty years.

Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private high school in Pittsburgh. She has published three chapbook collections, most recently, Bitter Acoustic, winner of the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook competition. McDermott has been a recipient of both a Pittsburgh Foundation Award and a PA Council on the Arts grant. Her poems have been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Seneca Review, and the anthology Common Wealth: Poets on Pennsylvania. Her book Life Without Furniture (Jacar Press NC) is forthcoming in May 2018.

Lori Jakiela is the author of five books, most recently the memoir BELIEF IS ITS OWN KIND OF TRUTH, MAYBE (Atticus Books), which received the William Saroyan Prize for International Writing from Stanford University, and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A BINGO WORKER (Bottom Dog Press), a collection of essays about work and the writing life. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and more. She received the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh Prize, a Golden Quill Award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, fellowships to the Breadloaf and Bennington writers conferences, and more. She directs the undergraduate Creative and Professional Writing Program at Pitt-Greensburg, where she is a professor of English. She teaches community workshops at The Yoga Deck in her hometown, Trafford, PA, and founded and co-directs Veterans Write, a program that offers free writing workshops to veterans and those who love them. Her sixth book — HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW, GENTLEMEN? — is a poetry collection forthcoming from Low Ghost Press in 2019. She lives in Trafford, PA with her husband/author Dave Newman and their children. Her author website is http://lorijakiela.net. Chuck Kinder taught her to box and be kind, not necessarily in that order. She is forever grateful to him.

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit and now lives in Pittsburgh. His poems and prose have appeared in a number of fine periodicals including Kitchen Sink, Third Coast, The Chariton Review, Nerve Cowboy, Words Dance, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Six Gallery Press published his first full-length collection of poems Unattended Fire in 2012 and Low Ghost Press published The River Underneath the City in 2013.

 

Michael Simms has been active in politics and poetry for over 40 years as a writer, teacher, editor, and community activist. He’s the founder and editor of Vox Populi, an online “gazette of the left” and he’s the founder of Autumn House Press, a nonprofit publisher of books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He’s also the author of four collections of poetry and a college textbook about poetry — and the lead editor of over 100 published books. Simms has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Certificate in Plant-based Nutrition from Cornell University. He lives with his wife, Eva in the historic Mount Washington neighborhood overlooking Pittsburgh.

Dave Newman is the author of six books, including Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (Broken River Books, forthcoming 2018), the novella Sammy Drinks Canned Beer (White Gorilla Press, forthcoming 2018), The Poem Factory (White Gorilla Press, 2015), the novels Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012) and Two Small Birds (Writers Tribe Books, 2014), and the collection The Slaughterhouse Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013), named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. He lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela, and their two children. He works in medical research, serving elders.

Micki Myers is the author of two books of poetry, Trigger Finger, and It’s Probably Nothing…, and her work has appeared widely in print and online. She is the author of the blog Yuckylicious and is currently co-writing and editing a series of children’s books that incorporate virtual reality. Micki teaches English and lives in Squirrel Hill.

 

Toi Derricotte has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Undertaker’s Daughter.  Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, received the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year.  She is a recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and two Pushcart Prizes, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996.  She has served on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

FREE but you gotta RSVP!

Cover painting by Paulette Poullet coming soon. For now, here’s this.

10/26 Nancy Chen Long, Bob Walicki, & Angele Ellis @ City of Asylum

8PM THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26…

Join us for a poetry reading exploring themes of cultural and class identity.

The fluid nature of identity as it changes through time as well as through familial and societal influences,” as Indiana poet Nancy Chen Long defines her work, is a common thread linking her to Pittsburgh poets Angele Ellis and Robert Walicki. Chen Long—an engineer and the immigrant daughter of a Taiwanese mother and American father, Ellis—the activist grandchild of Arab immigrants, and Walicki—whose day job as a plumber brings him into direct conflict with common notions of masculinity, add new and brilliant strands to the tapestry of American poetry.

Featured writers:

Nancy Chen Long was born in Taipei to a Taiwanese mother and an American father, and came to the U.S. at age six. A 2017 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellow, her first book, Light into Bodies, won the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. It touches on the fluid nature of identity as it changes through time as well as through familial and societal influences. Nancy has a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, an MBA, and an MFA. She works in Research Technologies at Indiana University Her poetry has appeared in Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, Briar Cliff Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and elsewhere

Robert Walicki is a native Pittsburgher who works as a plumber. His poetry chapbooks A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet, 2016) reflect aspects of Pittsburgh’s rich working class history, and examine issues of personal and class identity. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Robert’s poetry has appeared in Vox Populi, Stone Highway Review, The Kentucky Review, Red River Review, and elsewhere. The Almost Sound of Snow Falling was nominated to the 2016 list of books for Poets House, a 70,000-volume free library in New York City.

Angele Ellis is a longtime editor and activist whose first book of poems, Arab on Radar (Six Gallery, 2007), written from her perspective as an Arab American in the aftermath of 9/11, won an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She also is author of Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook, 2011), and a tribute to her adopted city, Under the Kaufmann’s Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh, with photos by Rebecca Clever (Six Gallery, 2016). Angele is co-author of Dealing With Differences (Corwin, 1997), an alternative curriculum named as a top multicultural classroom resource by The Christian Science Monitor, and is a contributing editor to Al Jadid: A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts.

8/16 The Bridge Series (Satellite Event) @ City of Asylum

8PM WEDNESDAY…

The Bridge Series is a new series uniting the Pittsburgh literary and activist communities to raise awareness and funds for local organizations. Each installment features writers from Pittsburgh and beyond and features a special guest organization, with proceeds from the evening going directly to that organization.

All Bridge Series events have a $5 cover. The proceeds from this event will go directly to The Center for Hearing & Deaf Services Inc. organization of Pittsburgh. Payment will be received at the door the day of the event.

There will be an ASL interpreter on site at this event.

Featuring readings by:

Christopher Jon Heuer – Christopher Jon Heuer is the author of Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution and All Your Parts Intact: Poems, as well as the editor of the recently released Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. He was the Editor in Chief of the highly popular website Deaf Echo. His writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals spanning a nearly thirty-year writing career. He is a professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. and lives in Alexandria, VA with his wife and son.

Toi Derricotte – Toi Derricotte‘s most recent book is The Undertaker’s Daughter (Pitt Poetry Series). Her honors include the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem in 1996. She serves on the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

Katie Booth – Katie Booth’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in Aeon, Catapult, Indiana Review, Kaleidoscope, Mid-American Review, Vela, and NPR’s The Pulse, among other publications. She has received support from the Edward Albee Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her essay “The Sign for This” was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2016. She is currently a 2017-18 Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. Her first book, The Performance of Miracles, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Our guest organization:

The Center for Hearing & Deaf Services, Inc. (HDS) was established in 1920 as the League for the Hard of Hearing to provide social activities for people with a hearing loss. From these modest beginnings, HDS has evolved into southwestern Pennsylvania’s only comprehensive service center for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing or have other communication needs including spoken language interpreting services. Pittsburgh Language Access Network (PLAN) is a professional interpreting service for foreign languages.

HDS’ professional staff have developed innovative programs, including the first Chemical Dependency Program for the deaf and hard of hearing population in the tri-state area, an assistive listening and signaling device demonstration and sale center, a program providing activities for deaf and hard of hearing youth, and a Hearing Aid Recycling Program. HDS works hard to ensure that the programs and services offered meet the evolving needs of our constituency.

All floors of Alphabet City are wheelchair accessible and there is a reserved parking spot. Thanks to the generous support of RAD, we also have hearing assistive systems available for all programs, by advance request. If you have questions or need accommodations, please contact Paula Simon (psimon@cityofasylumpittsburgh.org).

for more information of City of Asylum or to rsvp to the event please see their website at http://www.alphabetcity.org/events/bridgeseries/

7/26 The Bridge Series w/ Osama Alomar, Malcolm Friend, & Lori Jakiela @ Brillobox

8PM 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).

$5 cover.

Tonight will feature readings from:

Osama Alomar – Born in Damascus, Syria in 1968 and now living in Chicago, Osama Alomar is one of the most well-respected Arabic poets writing today, and a prominent practitioner of the Arabic al-qisa al-qasira jiddan, the “very short story.” He is the author of Fullblood Arabian in English, and three collections of short stories and a volume of poetry in Arabic. Alomar’s first full-length collection of stories, The Teeth of the Comb, will be published by New Directions in April 2017. His short stories have been published by Newyorker.com, Noon, Conjunctions.com, The Coffin Factory, Electric Literature, and The Literary Review. He also performs as a musician.

Malcolm Friend – 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 (forthcoming, Glass Poetry), and has received awards and fellowships from organizations including CantoMundo, VONA/Voices of Our Nations, Backbone Press, 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.

Lori Jakiela – Lori Jakiela is the author of three memoirs, most recently Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Atticus Books, 2015), which received the William Saroyan Prize for International Writing from Stanford University. She is also the author of a poetry collection — Spot the Terrorist! (Turning Point, 2012) — and four limited-edition poetry chapbooks. Her newest book, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, a collection of memoir-essays about work and the writing life, will be published by Bottom Dog Press in July. Her awards include the City of Asylum-Pittsburgh Prize, which sent her on a month-long writing residency in Brussels and for which she will always be grateful. Jakiela is a professor of English and director of the writing program at Pitt-Greensburg, co-director of the Summer Writers Festival at Chautauqua Institution, and the poetry curator for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She teaches community writing workshops in her hometown, Trafford, PA, where she lives with her husband, the writer Dave Newman, and their two children. For more, visit http://lorijakiela.net/

Our guest organization for the evening is City of Asylum.

City of Asylum creates a thriving community for writers, readers, and neighbors. We provide sanctuary to endangered literary writers, so that they can continue to write and their voices are not silenced. We offer a broad range of literary programs in a variety of community settings to encourage cross-cultural exchange. We anchor neighborhood economic development by transforming blighted properties into homes for these programs and energizing public spaces through public art with text-based components.
http://cityofasylum.org/

And tonight we also have the pleasure of hosting our friends from PEN America.

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
https://pen.org/

 

1/14 Grand Opening: City of Asylum Books @ Alphabet City

THIS SATURDAY, 11-5…

Please join us for the Grand Opening celebration of City of Asylum Books @ Alphabet City.

City of Asylum Books specializes in works in translation and world literature. Our genres range from literature and poetry to childrens and graphic novels.

Festivities will include:
11:30am: an all-ages childrens’ story hour with bookseller Jen
Discounts and giveaways
Coffee and snacks
+ surprises!

We are really excited to introduce our store to Pittsburgh. We hope you will join us.

A dozen of Six Gallery’s greatest hits MAY be available! Stay tuned.

6/26 Book Release: Late or Dear Tameka @ Belvedere’s & Ten Minute Play Fest @ City of Asylum

4PM TODAY…

Come celebrate the release of “Late or Dear Tameka,” a fully risograph printed chapbook that documents the forming of a friendship through Tameka Cage Conley and Daniel McCloskey’s email correspondence.

There will be reading, and revelry.

Attendance is free. Books will be for sale.

ALSO…

Join us for what might be our 16th?!?? Play festival!!! And We’re really excited about this play fest being at the City of Asylum in the north side.
We also have a full line up of knock your socks off plays!!!! With lots of newbies. so super exciting!!!

The theme is 1950s summer boardwalk. With Side Car Cocktails and Hotdogs, a hula hoop contest and more!!! Dress in theme and it’s oniy $3.
Not dressed in theme it’s $5.

this is an all ages event but some of the plays may contain adult content. a disclaimer will be given before each play begins if it does.

9/12 A Writer Rodeo @ ModernFormations; 9/13 I Don’t Know What I Would Do If I Couldn’t Speak My Mind @ City of Asylum Pittsburgh

THIS WEEKEND…

11:00 AM-11:10 AM Aubrey Baker

11:10 AM- 11:20 AM Joshua Bellin

11:20 AM-11:30 AM Wendy Scott

11:30 AM-11:40 AM Judith Dorian

11:40 AM-11:50 AM Julie Cecchini

11:50 AM-12:00 PM Sarah Williams-Devereux

12:00 PM- 12:10 PM Angele Ellis

12:10 PM-12:20 PM Bonita Lee Penn

12:20 PM-12:30 PM Malcolm Friend

12:30 PM-12:40 PM Sheila Kelly

12:40 PM-12:50 PM Jay Carson

12:50 PM-1:00 PM Arlene Weiner

1:00 PM-1:10 PM Barbara Dahlberg

1:10 PM- 1:20 PM Michael Albright

1:20 PM- 1:30 PM Kris Collins

1:30 PM- 1:40 PM Ann Curran

1:40 PM-1:50 PM E.B. Bortz

1:50- 2:00 PM Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

2:00 PM- 2:10 PM Kath Donnelly

2:10 PM-2:20 PM Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Artists

2:20 PM- 2:30 PM Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Artists

2:30 PM- 2:40 PM Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Artists

2:40 PM-2:50 PM Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Artists

2:50 PM-3:00 PM Jessica Server

3:00 PM-3:10 PM Joanne Samreny

3:10 PM- 3:20 PM Dakota Garilli

3:20 PM-3:30 PM R.J. Gibson

3:30 PM-3:40 PM Kelly Andrews

3:40 PM-3:50 PM Don Wentworth

3:50 PM-4:00 PM Stephen Pusateri

4:00 PM-4:10 PM Jean Croyle

4:10 PM-4:20 PM Jen Ashburn

4:20 PM-4:30 PM Jason Irwin

4:30 PM-4:40 PM City of Asylum

4:40 PM-4:50 PM City of Asylum

4:50 PM-5:00 PM City of Asylum

8/20 Kevin Finn & The Hills and The Rivers @ Alphabet City Tent

TOMORROW at 6PM, check out the latest Summer on Sampsonia performance. Free & in a tent!