June 25, 2013 (Kelly, Linder, Deahl, Wurster)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 25, 2013

Sheila Kelly is a retired psychotherapist, poet and playwright. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops, Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange and a regular facilitator for the Pittsburgh Writers’ Studio. Three of Sheila’s plays received staged readings at the 2009 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival. She has worked for many years with gifted middle school writers and published the annual, St. Bede’s Quill. Most recent work appears in Brief Encounters: Ekphrases from the Spinning Plate Gallery. Other poems upcoming in Voices from the Attic: Volume XIX.

Sheila Kelly’s Reading - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Norma West Linder was born in Toronto during 1928, but spent her childhood on Manitoulin Island and her teenage years in Muskoka. She is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, International PEN, and The Ontario Poetry Society. She was a founding member of Writers in Transition and served as President of the Sarnia Branch of the Canadian Authors Association. Linder is the author of five novels, fourteen collections of poetry, a memoir of Manitoulin Island, a children’s book, and a biography of Pauline McGibbon. For twenty-four years she was on the faculty of Lambton College, teaching English and Creative Writing. Her short stories have been published internationally, are widely anthologized, and have been broadcast on CBC radio.  Her books of poetry include: On the Side of the Angels, Ring Around the Sun, Pyramid, The Rooming House, River of Lethe: A Journey Through Alzheimer’s and When Angels Weep, among others.

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James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands region of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970. He is the author (or, in the case of Tu Fu, translator) of twenty-two literary titles, including No Star Is Lost and If Ever Two Were One. A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour TV special, Under the Watchful Eye (Silver Falls Video Productions, 1993). The audiotape of Under the Watchful Eye was released by Broken Jaw Press in September, 1995. These have been reissued on CD and DVD by Silver Falls. 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 the past dozen years has mostly been a full-time writer/editor/translator. As a critic and literary historian, Deahl is the leading Acornic scholar. James Deahl lives in Sarnia, Canada.

James Deahl’s Reading - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Michael Wurster has lived in Pittsburgh since 1962 and is a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchanged.  For 17 years, 1993-2010, he taught at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School.  He is author or co-editor of four published books, including The Snake Charmer’s Daughter (ELEMENOPE, 2000) and The British Detective (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2009).  Newer work is recent or forthcoming in 5 AM, California Quarterly, and Descant. 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.

Michael Wurster’s Reading - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

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June 18, 2013 (Edelman, Flick, McIlroy)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 18, 2013

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.

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Sherrie Flick is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books) and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume). Her flash fiction appears in many journals and anthologies including Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction. She teaches Food Writing, a variety of fiction workshops, and Readings in Fiction in Chatham University’s MFA program and writes a regular food column for Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine. Co-founder of Into the Furnace, a writer-in-residence program in Braddock, Pa., she also serves as series editor for At Table, the food writing book list at University of Nebraska Press.

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Leslie Anne McIlroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Leslie’s poetry appears in numerous publications including Dogwood, The Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Pearl and forthcoming in Barely South Review. Leslie works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas.

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Open Mic

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June 11, 2013 (McDermott, St. John, Carson, Carter-Jones)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 11, 2013

Sharon McDermott is a poet, who teaches in the upper school of Winchester Thurston School. She is the author of three small collections of poetry: Voluptuous (Ultima Obscura Press), Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, U. of Wisconsin) and most recently, Bitter Acoustic (2012, Jacar Press.) McDermott is a past recipient of both an artist grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and a PA Council on the Arts grant. She is also a musician, who likes to mix music into her poetry readings whenever possible.

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Rick St. John studied English at Princeton University (B.A.) and the University of Virginia (M.A.). Following 20 years of work in community development, Rick completed a mid-career Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, and then founded and directed "Conversations for Common Wealth,” which used poetry and other materials to help small groups of citizens connect across difference and reflect on their own contributions to the common good. His poems have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, 5 a.m., Poet Lore, Sewanee Review and many other periodicals.  His book, The Pure Inconstancy of Grace was published in 2005 by Truman State University Press. For some years, Rick was Executive Director of Autumn House Press, a non-profit literary publishing house based in Pittsburgh.  He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Kate. 

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A seventh generation Pittsburgher, Jay Carson teaches creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he is a University Professor and a faculty advisor to the student literary journal, Rune. Active professionally, Jay regularly presents, reads, and publishes in local and national venues. More than 60 of his poems have appeared in national literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He has also co-edited with Judith Robinson a collection of Margaret Menamin's poetry entitled, The Snow Falls Up. His first full-length book of poetry, Cinnamon of Desire, was published in 2013 by Main Street Rag. Jay has also published a chapbook, Irish Coffee, with Coal Hill Review. Jay considers his poetry Appalachian, Irish, accessible, and the problem-solving spiritual survival of a raging, youth -- and just what you might need.

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Sheila Carter-Jones has been described by Herbert Woodward Martin as one who writes with "immediacy of tone, voice and language." Much of her work to date charts in images and music the lived experiences of a small-town girl brought up in a house across from the boney dump of Republic Steel Coal Mines outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been published in Pennsylvania Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Tri-State Anthology, Blair Mountain Press and Flights. Grace Cavalieri, producer and host of "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" says that Sheila's recent book Blackberry Cobbler Song premiers a narrative poet in the greatest tradition of American storytellers.

Sheila Carter-Jones’ Reading - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

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June 4, 2013 (Hatcher, Hirsch, Karasek, Bauer)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 04, 2013

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 French Lessons.

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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. 

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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.  

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Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 5 AM, Cider Press Review, Pearl, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, Slipstream, US 1 Worksheets, and more than a dozen 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), and Voices from the Attic (Carlow University Press), among them. In 2007, her poem, "Sleepers," won the Earl Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International.  Joan divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she curates the Hemingway Summer Poetry Series with Jimmy Cvetic.

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Open Mic

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