6/28 The Bridge Series – Corso, Yune, Krygowski, & GPLC @ Brillobox

8PM WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28…

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:

Paola Corso is the author of poetry and fiction books set in her native Pittsburgh where her Italian immigrant family worked in the steel mills. Corso’s latest are The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award in Creative Writing and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing featuring steel and garment workers. Writing honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and inclusion on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Literary Map. She is co-founder and resident artist for Steppin Stanzas, a performing arts project celebrating Pittsburgh city steps. paolacorso.com.

As a Navy brat, Robert Yune moved 11 times by the time he turned 18. In 2012, he was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award and was one of five finalists for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His fiction has appeared in the Green Mountains Review, the Kenyon Review, and Los Angeles Review, among others.
In the summer of 2012, he worked as a stand-in for George Takei and has worked as an extra in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Father and Daughters.
Currently, he teaches at DePauw University, located in beautiful Greencastle, Indiana. His novel Eighty Days of Sunlight was nominated for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award; other nominees included Viet Thanh Nguyen, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie.

Nancy Krygowski’s first book of poems, Velocity, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, a Pittsburgh Foundation Grant, and several residencies. Krygowski teaches poetry workshops in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic program in addition to her work as an adult ESL instructor at Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.

Our guest organization for the evening is the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.

Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council’s mission is better lives through learning. Our primary focus is helping adults acquire the language and literacy skills needed to be successful neighbors, parents and workers. We provide both classroom instruction and one-on-one tutoring in reading, English, math, English as a second language, workplace skills and computers. We also help students to prepare for the high school equivalency exams. Volunteer tutors and the generosity of local businesses and individuals ensure that instruction is available free of charge to people in need. GPLC students go on to get jobs, move off the welfare rolls, attend college, complete job training and earn promotions. They give back to our community and instill the importance of education in their children. For more information, call 412-393-7600 or visit www.gplc.org.

10/19 Versify “In the Margins” @ EEBX

TODAY at EEBX, this is happening:

Join us on Saturday, October 19th at 7:30pm for a Versify reading benefiting The Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council

featuring: Barbara Edelman, Angele Ellis, Keely Bowers, and Lynne Walicki!

Come early to meet the authors and learn about how the gift of literacy can make a difference in our lives!

East End Book Exchange

4754 Liberty Ave 15224

(412) 224-2847

There will be a book signing at this event and light refreshment will be provided….

This series is hosted and curated by Bob Walicki.

Author Bios:

Barbara Edelman teaches writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, “A Girl in Water,” from Parallel Press at the University of Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, and 5 AM; in translation in the Italian journal, Nuovi Argomenti; and in several anthologies. Her short prose has appeared in the journals Rattle and Arts & Letters. She has received the Scott Turow Award for short fiction, an individualartist grant in poetry from the PA Council on the Arts, residency fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a 2012 Student’s Choice Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of Pittsburgh’s College of General Studies . Her one-act play, “Charades,” received production as a winner in the Pittsburgh New Works Festival.

Keely Bowers has published stories in Crazyhorse, Creative Nonfiction, and the Dickinson Review, and she won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for fiction. She lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches creative and technical writing at the University of Pittsburgh, raises her son, and studies science.

Angele Ellis is the author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery)–poems from which earned her a 2008 fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts–and Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook). She was a runner-up in the 2012 Grey Sparrow Flash Fiction Contest, received an honorable mention in the 2011 Shine Journal Poetry Contest, won the 2009 Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest, and earned third prize in the 2007 RAWI Competition for Creative Prose. Her poetry and fiction–including poems from her new chapbook manuscript and chapters from her novel in progress, “Desert Storms”–have appeared widely. She lives in Friendship, both a Pittsburgh neighborhood and a state of mind.