Thursday, September 20, 2012

Ed Ochester Tribute Reading



Ed Ochester Tribute Reading
September 20, 2012
 
Ed Ochester’s collections of poetry include We Like It Here (1967); Dancing on the Edge of Knives (1973), winner of the Devins Award for Poetry; Miracle Mile (1984); Allegheny (1995); Snow White Horses: Selected Poems 1973–1988 (1988); The Land of Cockaigne (2001); and Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (2007). He is the longtime editor of the Pitt Poetry Series (University of Pittsburgh Press), and the founding editor of the journal 5AM.

Participating poets and writers included Autumn House Press publisher Michael Simms; poet Judith Vollmer, author of The Water Books and a founding editor of 5  AM; poet Jan Beatty, author of Red Sugar; poet Michael Wurster, author of The British Detective; and poet/memoirist Lori Jakiela, author of Spot the Terrorist.

After the opening readers, Ed Ochester took the stage to read new and selected work. A book signing and reception followed the readings.

Ochester has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For his contributions to the arts, he received the George Garrett Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in 2006 and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trusts’ Creative Achievement Award in 2001. He is professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and is on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars.

Below you will find links to the reading. A link to the entire reading will be listed first. Links to the contributions of individual poets follow.

Mac users who lack a 2-button mouse may press Control-Click on the appropriate links to enable downloads.



Tuesday, July 31, 2012

July 31, 2012 (Grand Finale)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
July 31, 2012

Nour Abdelghani
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Nour Abdelghani moved to Pittsburgh in 2005. She is a 2010 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh where she co-edited the Three Rivers Review literary magazine and met a group of amazing writers. Her fiction has appeared in issue 05 of Weave Magazine and the second volume of The New Fraktur. She was the recipient on the 2009 Myron Taube award in fiction and the 1st prize, Prosody/Writer’s Café creative non-fiction award. Her non-fiction was featured on WYEP’s Prosody in 2009.


Madalon Amenta acted in productions of the Provincetown Playhouse and Circle in the Square in New York City, and Poets’ Theater in Cambridge, MA.   As a nurse she published over 80 clinical and academic papers, manuals, newsletters, research reports and books, one of which won an American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award.  She is a member of Madwomen in the Attic and the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, and her poetry has appeared in Salon.com, Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Signatures, Natural Language and Stories about Time.  Her chapbook, Kandinsky and the Stars, (Finishing Line Press, 2010) was a finalist in both the Negative Capability Press International and the Blue Light Press Chapbook Competitions.


Marilyn Bates, author of It Could Drive You Crazy, was a "Poet in Person" with the International Poetry Forum. She was an invited reader at the Noontime Reading Series at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and at the James Wright Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in The MacGuffin, The Paterson Literary Review, One Trick Pony, Poet Lore, and The Potomac Review.  Her work is anthologized in Pass-Fail: 32 Stories about Teaching; My Aunties' Book: 35 Writers Talk About Their Other Mother; Voices in Italian Americana; Along These Rivers and What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century. Her one-act play, Life Without Nipples, was produced by the Pittsburgh New Works Theater Festival in 2007.  Her dramatic monologues were recited by Etta Cox in Womanscene, a fund-raising event for the Lupus Foundation.


Jerome Crooks began writing poetry in 1993 in Buffalo New York.  After finishing high school in Chesapeake VA in 1996, he moved to Pittsburgh, his father's home city, where he completed a BA in creative writing focusing on poetry at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is the co-author, with Jason Baldinger of The Whiskey Rebellion (Six Gallery Press, 2011), has edited a book for Encyclopedia Destructica, and runs a literary press, Speed and Briscoe, based in Pittsburgh.


Victoria Dym is a graduate of Ringling Brother’s Barnum and Bailey Clown College and has earned a BA in Philosophy, from the University of Pittsburgh as well as her MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry at Carlow University. Victoria has appeared in movies, on stage, television, radio and has had a stand-up comedy career. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, City Paper, and Pearl Magazine. She is certified as a Laughter Yoga Leader, an active Madwoman, and a frequent improviser at Steel City Improv. Victoria has taught poetry at the winter and summer Young Writer’s Institutes, has guest-lectured at Seton Hill University and Mellon Middle School, and founded Writers in the Woods in 2011.


Gene Hirsch
As a youngster, Gene Hirsch studied “New” music with Stefan Wolpe. He received an MD degree with an academic career in Cardiology, Geriatrics, and Humanities in Medicine.  He has written poetry since medical school with poems appearing in medical journals, anthologies, Crossing Limits, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and others.  In 1992, Gene initiated a writing program at the John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC, in which he teaches and has produced five anthologies featuring students and an active poetry community.  He has been resident poet at the folk school, Consortium Ethics Program (Univ. Pitt.), and Forbes Hospice.  He attends the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. 


Don Wentworth writes poetry in the short form and has had work published in bear creek haiku, Rolling Stone, Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, The New Yinzer, Cotyledon, Encylopedia  Destructica, and the anthologies Prairie Smoke and To Life.  His first full-length volume, Past All Traps, was published by Six Gallery Press in 2011.


Sarah Williams-Devereux is a transformative language artist, and teaches poetry for the Madwomen in the Attic workshops. Her work has been published in Sampsonia Way Magazine, Pittsburgh City Paper, The New Yinzer’s Pittsburgh Love Stories anthology, and Voices from the Attic. She has read her work locally at various venues, including Prosody, the Choice Cuts Reading Series, The New Yinzer Reading Series, She Said, and The Hungry Sphinx Reading Series. She is the co-author of the research monograph Our Stories, Our Selves: A3P: The African American Arts Project: A Study of African American Young Adult Arts Participation (PITT ARTS, University of Pittsburgh, 2006).


Jimmy Cvetic has been writing and performing poetry all his life. A retired county police officer, he is the director of the Pittsburgh Police Athletic League, and founder and director of the Summer Poetry Series at Hemingway's Cafe in Oakland.  His poems have appeared in the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette and other publications. He appears (briefly) in the movie, Warrior, filmed in Pittsburgh, and recently gave a featured reading of his poetry at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA with his friend, the actor Nick Nolte.  In 2010, Jimmy's book of poetry, The Secret Society of Dog, was published by Awesome Books/Lascaux Editions.


Open Mic


Tuesday, July 24, 2012

July 24, 2012 (Hoover, Jampole. Alberts, Schneider)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
July 24, 2012

Elizabeth Hoover is a poet, critic, and journalist. She has contributed poetry reviews and author interviews to such publications as The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The Dallas Morning News.  Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Hayden's Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, and The Massachusetts Review, among others. In 2012, she received second place in the Split This Rock Poetry of Provocation and Witness Contest.  Other honors include a residency at the Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts, and nominations for Sundress Publications Best of the Net award, and a Pushcart. She received a combined MFA/MA from Indiana University and is currently working on biographies of Walter Dean Myers and Robert Hayden.


Marc Jampole wrote Music from Words, published by Bellday Books.  His poetry has appeared in Evansville Review, Mississippi Review, Cortland Review, Vallum, Slant, Ellipsis and other journals.  Through the years, four of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. More than 1,200 freelance articles he has written on a various topics have been published in magazines and newspapers.  Marc also writes the OpEdge blog, which appears on the websites of two national publications.  


Renée Alberts poetry and visual art have appeared in print, dance performances, live radio shows and at least one tattoo.  As They Fall, a collection of short poems from her Detail a Day Project, was published by Lilliput Broadsides in 2012.  She is author of the collection, No Water, and editor of Natural Language: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Sunday Poetry and Reading Anthology, a collection of writers featured in the series she founded.  She guest hosts WESA 90.5 FM's Prosody and moderates the Pittsburgh Literary Calendar.


Mike Schneider has written widely in Pittsburgh publications, including award-winning articles in Pittsburgh Magazine. He organized the February 2003 reading in Market Square where 27 Pittsburgh-area poets expressed their opposition to impending war in Iraq. He received a 2003-04 Creative Artists Stipend in Arts Commentary from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. His poems appear in several anthologies and many journals, including 5 AM, Hunger Mountain, Notre Dame Review, Cimarron Review, Atlanta Review, Shenandoah, Poet Lore and Poetry.  His chapbook, Rooster, came out in 2004.


Open Mic


Tuesday, July 17, 2012

July 17, 2012 (Gibb, Simms, Bauer)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
July 17, 2012

Robert Gibb was born and still lives in Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine books of poetry including Sheet Music (2012) and What the Heart Can Bear (2009) published by Autumn House Press. Among his awards are the National Poetry Series, two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, The Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil’s Millhopper Chapbook Prize. Robert Gibb won the 1997 National Poetry Series Competition for The Origins of Evening.  It, along with his next two books, The Burning World and World over Water, comprise what Gibb calls The Homestead Trilogy, a nearly 100-poem cycle focusing on the fading industrial history and culture of America's Steel City.  As Tar River Poetry Review has noted, " Robert Gibb's poetry will give readers an idea of what Wordsworth might have been had he lived in the late twentieth century."


Michael Simms is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Autumn House Press, a non-profit press based in Pittsburgh. He is the author of five collections of poetry: Black Stone, The Happiness of Animals, The Fire-Eater, Migration, and Notes on Continuing Light, as well as the co-author of The Longman Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry. He has taught at The University of Iowa, Southern Methodist University, The Community College of Allegheny County, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, and Duquesne University. He lives with his wife Eva and their two children in the historic Mount Washington neighborhood overlooking downtown Pittsburgh and the Monongahela River.


Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag). Her poetry has appeared in the journals, 5 AM, New Renaissance, Quarterly West, and the anthologies Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach), among others. In 2007, she won the Earl Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International, and her poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. With Jimmy Cvetic, she curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series.


Open Mic


Tuesday, July 10, 2012

July 10, 2012 (Carson, Robinson, Peterson)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
July 10, 2012

Jay Carson teaches creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he is also a faculty advisor to the student literary, journal, Rune.  Jay has published more than 60 poems in local and national journals, magazines, and collections. Jay's chapbook, Irish Coffee, was published by Coal Hill Review  in summer 2012.


Judith Robinson is an editor, teacher, fiction writer and poet.  A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she has been published in numerous magazines, newspapers and anthologies. She was editor of Living Inland, author of The Beautiful Wife and Other Stories; poetry editor of Signatures.  She currently teaches poetry in the ALL Program at Carnegie Mellon University.  She is editor of Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts) and co-editor with Michael Wurster of Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant).  Her chapbook, Dinner Date, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2009.  Her new chapbook of poems about the Holocaust, The Blue Heart, will be published soon by Finishing Line Press, and her new book of poetry, Orange Fire, will be published in the fall by Main Street Rag.


Walt Peterson is the author of three chapbooks of poetry. His last, In the Waiting Room of the Speedy Muffler King, won the Acorn-Rukeyser Award. In addition, he has a memoir, articles on cars and photographs published and does writing workshops, currently, with Franciscan nuns and incarcerated men at SCI Pine Grove in Indiana, PA.  In 2010, he facilitated the creation of the multi-media project and book, Fission and Form, bringing together the work of painters, sculptors and poets.


Jimmy Cvetic reads Green Sprinkler Bottle


Open Mic


Tuesday, July 3, 2012

July 3, 2012 (Khoury, Karasek, St. John, Hatcher, Esaias)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
July 3, 2012

Jill Khoury's poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Sentence, la fovea, and Harpur Palate. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice by Breath and Shadow: A Journal of Disability Culture and Literature. Her most recent publications include a contribution to Open Thread, a regional review that features writers from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and a chapbook, Borrowed Bodies (Pudding House).


Joseph Karasek performed as an actor and violinist with The Theater Within, an improvisational theater group in New York City.  A former violist with the National Orchestral Association, he created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels., and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University.  Living in Pittsburgh, Pa since, 1991, he has taught philosophy at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Carnegie Mellon University.  Several years ago, he led a study group on James Joyce's Ulysses there.  His poetry has been published in Only the Sea Keeps:  Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts), and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets.  His two books of poetry, Beyond Waking and Love and the Ten Thousand Things, were published by Tebot Bach in 2009.


Richard St. John's book of poems, The Pure Inconstancy of Grace, was published in 2005 by Truman State University Press, as first runner up for the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His long poem, Shrine, was released as a chapbook from Finishing Line Press in 2011.  His work has also appeared in Sewanee Review, Poet Lore, and Carolina Quarterly as well as many other periodicals and anthologies.  St. John received degrees in English from Princeton University and the University of Virginia. In 2002, he completed a mid-career Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Kate.  Both thoughtful and nearsighted, he has walked or run into numerous objects, including trees, doors, mailboxes and utility poles.


Roberta Hatcher teaches French at Duquesne University, and her research has involved French-language literatures from the world beyond France, in particular post-independence literatures of sub-Saharan Africa. She is also interested in African cinema, postcolonial studies, and the emerging field of French Atlantic studies. She has read in a number of poetry venues in Pittsburgh, and recently participated in a session of "Border Crossing Poetry" at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference held in Montreal. She was a 2009 finalist for the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and is currently working on a manuscript titled Boundary Waters.


Timons Esaias lives in Pittsburgh, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, with his wife who is a physician. He writes satire, speculative fiction, poetry, and the occasional essay. His work has appeared in over a dozen different countries, and fifteen languages. He has been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award (1998) and the Rhysling Award (5 nominations, Third Place 1997), and he won the Asimov's Readers' Award for Poetry (2005). He is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange; Demeritus of the  Worldwrights; a certified Rogue in Lair #1 of the Rascals, Rogues & Rapscallions. He is Adjunct Faculty at Seton Hill University, primarily in the Masters Program for Writing Popular Fiction.


Open Mic



Tuesday, June 26, 2012

June 26, 2012 (Wilson, James, Wurster)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
June 26, 2012

Lori Wilson works as a computer systems analyst.  She received her M.A. in Economics from Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals and publications, including the new anthology, Along These Rivers, Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant Publishing, 2008). A resident of Morgantown, West Virginia, she has four grown children.  Her book of poetry, House Where a Woman, was published by Autumn House Press in 2008.


Mike James, a native of South Carolina, has lived in Louisiana, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Georgia where he now makes his home in the suburbs of Atlanta. His poetry has been widely published in magazines and newspapers throughout the country. His books of poetry include Not Here, All Those Goodbyes, Pennies From An Empty Jar, Nothing But Love and Alternate Endings. Since 2005, he and his wife, Diane, have run Yellow Pepper Press, a small poetry broadside press. Mike was formerly a member of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, and he's traveling here as we celebrate his newest book of poetry, Past Due Notices, published in April 2012 by Main Street Rag.


Michael Wurster was born in Moline, Illinois, and has lived in Iowa, Virginia and Pennsylvania. He currently resides in Pittsburgh with his Siamese cat, Hawthorne. He is a founding member of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange and for seventeen years taught poetry Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School. His most recent book of poetry is The British Detective published by Main Street Rag. Two previous poetry collections are The Cruelty of the Desert (Cottage Wordsmiths, 1989) and The Snake Charmer's Daughter (ELEMENOPE, 2000). He is co-editor, with Judith R. Robinson, of the anthology Along These Rivers: Poetry & Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant Press, 2008). In 1996, Wurster was an inaugural recipient of a Pittsburgh Magazine Harry Schwalb Excellence in the Arts Award for his contributions to poetry and the community.


Open Mic


Tuesday, June 19, 2012

June 19, 2012 (Roffman, Terman, Daniels)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
June 19, 2012

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, facilitator of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, taught creative writing, myth and literature and started a Myth/Folklore Studies Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She co-edited the prize-winning anthology Life on the Line and is author of Going to Bed Whole, Tottering Palaces and The Approximate Message. She has read her poems in Ireland, Greece, Mexico, Israel, Spain and the Czech Republic and was a featured writer on the BBC's "Writer from Abroad" series. Her work has been published in Centennial Review, Riverrun, MacGuffin, Main Street Rag and the Pittsburgh Quarterly and she is the recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts at IUP. In 2008 her 16th collaborative piece, "Furoshiki" (languages that speak without words at the center) had its premier in Valley Forge before an audience of arts educators.  Her book of poetry, I Want to Thank My Eyes, was published by Tebot Bach in spring 2012.


Philip Terman’s most book of poetry is In the Torah Garden, published by Autumn House Press in 2011.  His earlier books include The House of Sages, Book of the Unbroken Days and Rabbis of the Air. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Tikkun, and Blood to Remember: American Poets Respond to the Holocaust. He is the recipient of the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Award, The Kenneth Patchen Prize, and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He teaches creative writing and literature at Clarion University and co-directs the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival at the Chautauqua Institute. With his wife Christine and their daughters Mimi and Bella, he resides in a red-brick schoolhouse outside of Grove City, Pennsylvania.


Jim Daniels has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon since 1981. Recent books include Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry and From Milltown to Malltown. His fourth collection of short stories, Trigger Man, was published in 2011. In 2007, he was awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies. Street, a book of his poems accompanying the photographs of Charlee Brodsky, won the Tillie Olsen Prize from the Working-Class Studies Association in 2006. He has edited or co-edited four anthologies, including Letters to America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. His poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac," in Billy Collins' Poetry 180 anthologies, and Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" series. Daniels received the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.


Jimmy Cvetic reads Happy Little Lambs Nursery School


Open Mic



Tuesday, June 12, 2012

June 12, 2012 (Adès, Edelman, Collins, Smith)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
June 12, 2012

David Adès moved to Pittsburgh from Adelaide, Australia in April 2011.  His poems have appeared widely in Australia,in publications including over 20 of the Friendly Street Poetry Readers and numerous Australian literary magazines, such as Island, Blue Dog, Five Bells, Tirra, Wet Ink, Famous Reporter, Transnational Literature and others with some poems also appearing in translation in Vatra (Rumania).  He has appeared on the Australian radio program Poetica, and is one of 9 poets featured in a CD title 'Adelaide 9 The Poetry of the City.'  His collection, Mapping the World, was commended for the Fellowship of Australian Writers Anne Elder Award 2008.


Barbara Edelman is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Girl in Water, from Parallel Press. Her poems and prose have appeared in various journals, among them Prairie Schooner, Rattle, 5 AM, and Arts & Letters, and in several anthologies. She has received a PA Council on the Arts grant in poetry and residency fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh.


Kristopher Collins is the Books Editor of Pittsburgh Magazine.  He runs Low Ghost Press.  He also owns Desolation Row Records and manages Caliban Bookshop in Oakland.  His most recent chapbook is "Last Call" published by Speed & Briscoe in 2010.


Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Now Culture, The American Poetry Review, Cerise, The Same, Kestrel, Oranges & Sardines, Diner, 5 a.m., Oxford Magazine, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Descant (Canada), and others. Anthology publications include Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos, 2011), Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv (Red Hen Press, 2008),and others. Flash fiction in Weave, Switchback, Thick Jam, and The Shadyside Review; forthcoming in Thumbnail Magazine.


Open Mic


Tuesday, June 5, 2012

June 5, 2012 (Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
June 5, 2012

Anthony Ciotoli has been teaching mathematics, and occasionally, other subjects to at risk teens for over twenty years. Anthony was born in Rome and grew up in the suburbs of New York City. He came to Pittsburgh to attend college and never left. His poetry has appeared in Italian Americana He is a member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop and in the fall, he will begin MFA studies in creative writing at Chatham University.


Ann Curran is the author of the chapbook, Placement Test ((Main Street Rag). Her poetry has appeared in Rosebud, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, Blue Line, Third Wednesday, Notre Dame Magazine, Ireland of the Welcomes, and others, as well as the anthologies, Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant), Motif 2 Come What May (Motes Books), and Thatchwork (Delaware Valley Poets)  She has degrees from Duquesne University.  


Nancy Esther James has had her poems published in various journals and literary magazines including Christianity and Literature, Time of Singing, and Poet Lore, as well as in other publications such as Friends Journal and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Her poem, “To a Friend,” originally published in Christianity and Literature, was reprinted in the 2003 Poet’s Market.  Her collection of poems, No Time to Hurry, was published by Dawn Valley Press (Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA) in 1979. She has taught poetry workshops at the St. Davids Christian Writers Conference and The Writing Academy Seminar and has judged poetry contests for St. Davids and for the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.


Christine Doreian Michaels came from England in 1971 and is a retired psychologist living in Regent Square. She was an invited reader at the James Wright Poetry Festival, and is published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Exchange, Taproots, Songs For The Living, Signatures 2001, 2003, 2006, and the international anthologies, No Choice But To Trust and Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami. She won first poetry prize in The Labyrinth Society's annual contest 2007 and has a poem in Along These Rivers, an anthology celebrating Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary.


Randy Minnich is a retired chemist, now focusing on writing, environmental issues, t’ai chi, and grandchildren.  A member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop and Pittsburgh Poetry Society, he has published two books, Wildness in a Small Place and Pavlov’s Cats.  His work has also appeared in Main Street Rag, Pearl, Pudding, Snowy Egret, Blueline, and other publications.


Pam O'Brien began writing poetry at Allegheny College and was hooked once her strange response to The Beatles' “Strawberry Fields Forever” was published in the literary magazine. Her career has included grant writing, community organization, public relations and advertising, and teaching Spanish. She currently holds a lectureship in the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh where she serves as the Associate Director of Public and Professional Writing. She was a 2012 finalist for the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award and recipient of teaching excellence awards from the College of General Studies in 2008 and 2011. She has published three chapbooks, Kaleidoscopes, Paper Dancing and Acceptable Losses. Her full-length poetry book, The Answer to Each is the Same, will be released by Dos Madres Press in 2012.


Joanne Samraney, author of the poetry chapbook, Grounded Angels, which won the 2001 Acorn-Rukeyser Award and co-author of Breaking Bread with the Boscos, a collection of family memoirs and recipes has poems in many literary magazines and journals such as Main Street Rag, Verve, Voices in Italian Americana, Loyalhanna Review  and most recently in Hudson View, Earth Daughters and Steam Ticket.  Her poems have also appears in both Along These Rivers and the Sandburg-Livesay Anthologies.  Her latest chapbook, Remaking Driftwood was published by Finishing Line Press (2010).


Shirley Stevens is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Society and the Squirrel Hill Poetry, and St. David’s workshops.  She serves as a mentor for the Writing Academy and a poetry workshop leader for Passavant Retirement Village and The First Word.   Her poems most recently appeared in The Potter’s Wheel, Honing the Poem, and A Time of Singing, as well as Poet Lore, Along These Rivers,  Fission of Form, The CommonWealth: Pennsylvania Poets on Pennsylvania Subjects, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Squirrel Hill Magazine.  She is the author of Pronouncing What We Want to Keep.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

May 29, 2012 (Beatty, Vollmer, Ochester)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
May 29, 2012

Jan Beatty’s most recent book, Red Sugar, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring, 2008. Other books include Boneshaker (2002, U. of Pgh. Press) and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Ravenous, her limited edition chapbook, won the 1995 State Street Prize. Beatty’s poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Iowa Press. Awards include the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For the past thirteen years, she has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers. Beatty directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the MFA program. Her new book, The Switching Yard, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in Spring, 2013.


Judith Vollmer's newest volume, Water Books, was recently published by Autumn House Press. Her previous collections have received the Brittingham, the Center for Book Arts, and the Cleveland State publication prizes. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her essays and reviews are included in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and is a founding editor of the literary journal 5 AM.


Ed Ochester
Through his writing, editing and teaching, Ed Ochester has been a major force on contemporary letters for more than three decades. He edits the Pitt Poetry Series and is general editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction, both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. From 1978 to 1988 he was director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and was twice elected president of the Associated Writing Programs. He co-edits the poetry magazine 5AM, and lives in a rural county northeast of Pittsburgh. His recent books include Snow White Horses: Selected Poems 1973-1988 (Autumn House Press, 2001), American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) and Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (Autumn House Press, 2007). Poems just published or forthcoming in: American Poetry Review, Agni, Chiron Review, Great River Review and Nerve Cowboy.


Jimmy Cvetic reads Chippendale’s Riot


Open Mic


Tuesday, May 22, 2012

May 22, 2012 (Greenberg, Brice, Carter-Jones, Deahl)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
May 22, 2012

Lois Greenberg is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who makes her living as a psychotherapist, specializing in grief and adoption issues.  She has  two grown children and earned her MSW from the University of Pittsburgh, where she served on the faculty from 1978-1991.  She has studied with Michael Wurster, Jan Beaty, Ellen Smith and others.  Her poetry has appeared in HEArt, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Paper Street, and the anthologies, The Eternal Fire, Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh, Alternatives to Surrender, and Voices from the Attic. Her first full-length book of poetry, Willing to Lie, has recently been published by MadBooks.


Judith Brice, a former psychiatrist, credits much of her inspiration to her past work with her patients, her own experiences with illness, her love for nature and her strong feelings about politics. Her work has been published in several newspapers, reviews, and anthologies including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the City Paper (of Pittsburgh), the Paterson Literary Review, Poesia, and The Lyric. She has received Editor’s Choice Award in the Alan Ginsburg Poetry Contest in 2008 Paterson Literary Review for one of her poems, and another poem is currently in the permanent archives of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her book of poems, Renditions in a Palette, will be published by WordTech Communications in 2013.


Sheila Carter-Jones credits the domestic working women in the small coal mining community where she grew up as the spiritual source of her poetic inspiration. Her poetry is published in anthologies and journals including Crossing Limits, Pennsylvania Review, Riverspeak, and Coal: A Poetry Anthology, and a chapbook, Blackberry Cobbler Song. Her book of poetry, Three Birds Deep, was recently selected by Elizabeth Alexander for publication by Lotus Press.


James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970 and holds Canadian citizenship. He’s the author (or, in the case of Tu Fu’s poetry, translator) of twenty literary titles. His most recent books are North Of Belleville and Opening The Stone Heart. A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour TV special, Under the Watchful Eye. Both the video and an audiotape have been reissued on CD and DVD by Silver Falls Video. In addition to his writing, he has taught creative writing and Canadian literature at the high school, college, and university levels. He no longer teaches, and for over a dozen years has mostly been a full-time writer/editor/translator. James Deahl lives in Sarnia. He is the father of Sarah, Simone, and Shona.


Open Mic

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

May 15, 2012 (Barnes, McNaugher, Vicari)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
May 15, 2012

Madeleine Barnes is about to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University with a bachelor's degree in creative writing and fine arts. Her poems have appeared in The Rattling Wall, Weave Magazine, Open Thread, The Albion Review, Allegheny Review, 5AM, North Central Review and other journals.  She is the recipient of the 2009 Borders Open Door Poetry Prize, judged by Billy Collins, the Princeton Poetry Prize, and the Women's Press Club Prize for journalism. Some of her poetry and artwork can be found on the website: madeleinebarnes.com


Heather McNaugher teaches poetry, nonfiction, and literature at her alma mater, Chatham University, and is poetry editor of Fourth River. Her work has appeared in 5 A.M., The Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Leveler, and The Cortland Review, and on the radio show, Prosody. Her chapbook, Panic & Joy, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. She worked as a house cleaner and barista in Seattle, as a dog walker in Brooklyn, and then got her Ph.D. in English from The State University of New York at Binghamton. While working for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, she almost became a librarian. She's tried living elsewhere, but keeps coming back to Pittsburgh. Her book of poetry, System of Hideouts, was published by Main Street Rag in April 2012.


Justin Vicari's first full-length collection of poetry, The Professional Weepers, won the 2007-2008 Transcontinental Poetry Award, and was published in 2011 by Pavement Saw Press. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Siamese Twins of the 21st Century (West Town Press, 2008), and also the translator of Woman Bathing Light to Dark: Prose Poems of Paul Eluard (Toad Press, 2006) and The Baden-Baden Learning Play on Acquiescence by Bertolt Brecht (Toad Press, 2009). His work appears in The Ledge, Rhino, Southern Poetry Review, Fugue, Phoebe, Redactions, 32 Poems, Paper Street, Eclipse, Interim, and The Modern Review, and is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika. In 2005, he received the Third Coast Poetry Award.


Jimmy Cvetic reads 13 Ways to Look at a Boxer


Open Mic


Tuesday, May 8, 2012

May 8, 2012 (Madwomen in the Attic)


Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series
May 8, 2012

Tess Barry has an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently enrolled in Carlow University's MFA program.  Her work has appeared most recently in Natural Language: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Sunday Poetry and Reading Series Anthology, Carlow University Press's Voices from The Attic: Volume XVI, Girls with Glasses, and Sampsonia Way, an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh.  She has been a guest poet on WYEP's weekly radio show Prosody.


Doralee Brooks, a teacher in the Developmental Studies Department at the Community College of Allegheny County, is a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project. Doralee is an MFA candidate at Carlow University. Her work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Callaloo.


Angela J. Cornelius is an artist, raconteur, entrepreneur, and foremost – a seeker.  She has worked for the federal government in international intelligence, corporate marketing and business, and higher education. Angela studied creative writing at George Mason University in Virginia, and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.  She was the flash fiction winner at Bumbershoot Arts Festival in 2004. As an educator, Angela was a public high school art teacher, nonprofit art instructor at Seattle 911 Media Arts, and Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Center for the Arts, and she was a professor in digital media at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Angela currently runs her own creative consulting business.


Caley Ferguson teaches Adult Basic Education through Literacy AmeriCorps in Pittsburgh and serves as a low-level ABE tutor in Squirrel Hill through the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council.  She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College with a BA in English literature and minors in creative writing and gender studies.  In college she served as poetry editor for two years with the WVW literary journal, The Vandalia, where her work was also published. As an undergrad she studied with Aaron Smith, and has been studying with Jan Beatty through the Madwomen program since fall of 2011.


Celeste Gainey holds a BFA in film and television from New York University and an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Carlow University.  Her chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography, selected by Elioses Klein Healy as a runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize was Published by Seven Kitchens Press was published in 2011.  Most recently, her poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review and BLOOM


Emily Mohn has published her poems in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Carlow University's Voices from the Attic. She has taught middle-school English, and currently works in the English department at Carnegie Mellon. A Pittsburgh native, she earned a BA from Colgate University and an MA from Boston University.


Maritza Mosquera, best known for her thousand-arm reach toward creating community and ending oppression through art; lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Being born amidst the Ecuadorian Andes peaked her desire for hot luscious delicacies close to her palate both in food, loving and art. She is best known for her work with contemporary artists, curators, educational leaders, community activists and leadership organizations; building lasting partnerships. Words have always existed in her work, both as printed and ethereal matter. Mosquera received her MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She exhibits her artwork and builds community through dialogues nationally and internationally.


Open Mic