June 30, 2015 (Shaw, Clarke, Bogen, Gibb)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

June 30, 2015

Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University. He is the author of the chapbook, Argot (Finishing Line Press). His poems have been published in 5AM, Poet Lore, Permafrost, SLAB, Spry Literary Magazine, Floodwall, Nerve Cowboy, Mason’s Road, Shaking Like A Mountain, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Pittsburgh City Paper, where he currently reviews books. In a parallel life, he has also worked in the service industry for the past twenty-five years.

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Robin Clarke is a poet, activist and teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is a non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers. She is the author of Lines the Quarry (Omnidawn, 2013), winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd book prize for poetry, and Lives of the Czars (nonpolygon, 2011), a chapbook co-authored with the poet Sten Carlson.

Robin Clarke - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Deborah Bogen is a poet and a novelist. Her poetry books, Landscape with Silos; Let Me Open You a Swan; and Living by the Children's Cemetery are all prize winners.  Her two novels are set in 13th century England and France.  The second novel, The Hounds of God, is newly available on Amazon and at Caliban Books in Oakland.  She spent this year avoiding housework by teaching poetry to 5th and 6th graders and playing ukelele in the Highland Park Mini-band. 

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Robert Gibb was born and still lives in Homestead, Pennsylvania. He is the author of ten 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 Works, 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."

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Open Mic

Open Mic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Jimmy Cvetic Reads Two Incomplete Poems

Jimmy Cvetic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

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June 23, 2015 (Boggess, Edelman, Schneider, Simms, Smith)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

June 23, 2015

Ace Boggess was locked up for five years in the West Virginia prison system. During that time, he wrote the poems collected in his book, The Prisoners (Brick Road Press, 2014) and published most of them. Prior to his incarceration, he earned his B.A. from Marshall University and his J.D. from West Virginia University. He has been awarded a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, and his poems have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Southern Humanities Review and The Florida Review. His first collection, The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled, appeared in 2003. He currently resides in Charleston,West Virginia.

Ace Boggess - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Barbara Edelman is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Exposure, from Finishing Line Press (2014) and A Girl in Water, from Parallel Press (2002).  Her poems and prose have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Rattle,  and Arts & Letters, and in several anthologies. Her full length poetry manuscript was chosen as one of six  finalists  in the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky Award from Persea Books. As a finalist for the Raynes Poetry Prize, her work will be included in the anthology World to Come forthcoming from  Blue Thread Books and Music, spring 2015.  Her one-act play, "Charades," received production as a winner in the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. She teaches writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Mike Schneider began writing poetry in the early 1970s when he published an anti-war "underground" newspaper at an air force base in Ohio. In Pittsburgh he's been a lawyer, teacher and award-winning freelance writer, including poetry book reviews in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh's City Paper. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Chautauqua, Notre Dame Review, New Ohio Review, Hunger Mountainand Poetry. His chapbook Rooster (2004) was an Editor's Choice publication from Main Street Rag. The Florida Review awarded him its 2012 Editors Award in Poetry.  

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Michael Simms is a publisher, teacher, and writer. He is the founder and editor of Vox Populi, an online magazine for politics and poetry: the founder of Coal Hill Review, a paper and online magazine for poetry and essays; and the founder and president of the nationally-renowned book publisher Autumn House Press. 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, CarnegieMellon University, Chatham University, and Duquesne University. He lives with his wife Eva and their two children in Mount Washington.

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Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron,and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award fromZone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her first full-length book of poetry, Nobody's Jacknife, will be published later this year by West End Press.

Ellen McGrath Smith - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

Open Mic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Jimmy Cvetic Reads 'Write the Poem for Us'

Write the Poem For Us - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

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June 16, 2015 (Barry, Sargeson, Gainey, Beatty)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

June 16, 2015

Tess Barry (MA in English, University of Pittsburgh; and MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry, Carlow University) was a finalist for North American Review’s 2012 and 2013 James Hearst Poetry Prize. A finalist for Aesthetica Magazine’s (England/UK) 2014 Poetry Award, Barry was also a 2013 finalist for the Aesthetica prize. She was shortlisted for the 2014 Bridport Poetry Prize (England/UK) and her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing 2015 Annual and North American Review. Barry is a Fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and longtime member of Carlow University ’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops. She teaches English, literature, and creative writing at Robert Morris University .  Her manuscript, Spring Barrel, is being submitted for publication.

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Kayla Sargeson is the author of the chapbooks BLAZE (Main Street Rag, 2015) and  Mini Love Gun (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her work has been anthologized in the national anthology, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as well as Voices from the Attic Volumes XIV and XIX, and Dionne’s Story. Her poems also appear or are forthcoming in 5 AM, Columbia Poetry Review, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag, and Prosody: NPR-affiliate WESA's weekly show featuring the work of national writers. She co-curates the MadFridays reading series and is the poetry editor for Pittsburgh City Paper’s online feature Chapter & Verse. She lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches at the Community College of Allegheny County.

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Celeste Gainey ’s full-length collection, the gaffer, chosen by Dorianne Laux as runner-up for the 2012 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, has been selected by Eloise Klein Healy for publication in 2015 by Arktoi Books, her imprint at Red Hen Press. Gainey’s chapbook, In the land of speculation & seismography, runner-up for the 2010 Robin Becker Prize, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in their 2011 Summer Kitchen Series; it is due to be re-issued in their Re-Bound Series in 2013. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, BLOOM, 5AM , Adanna, Wild Apples , and Madroad: The Breadline Press West Coast Anthology. A gaffer in the film industry and an architectural lighting designer, she holds a BFA in film and television from New York Universityand an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Carlow University . A native Californian, she now resides in Pittsburgh .  

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Jan Beatty’s fourth full-length book, The Switching/Yard, was named one of ...30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry by Library Journal. The Huffington Post named her as one of ten women writers for “required reading.” Other books include Red Sugar, Boneshaker, and Mad River, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty is host and producer of Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WESA-FM featuring the work of national writers. Beatty worked as a waitress for fifteen years, and as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and a social worker and teacher in maximum-security prisons. She is the managing editor of MadBooks, a small press that has published a series of books and chapbooks by women writers. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing  program.

Jan Beatty - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

Open Mic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Jimmy Cvetic Reads 'Dreaming of Bukowski'

Dreaming of Bukowski - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

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June 9, 2015 (Bashaar, Bernier, Kitchens, Mcilroy, Squillante)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

June 9, 2015

Margaret Bashaar's first book, Stationed Near the Gateway, was released by Sundress Publications in 2015. She also has three chapbooks, Barefoot and Listening (Tilt, 2009), Letters from Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel (Blood Pudding Press, 2011), and Rungs written with Lauren Eggert-Crowe (Grey Book Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in journals such as Caketrain, New South, Rhino, PANK, Copper Nickel, and Arsenic Lobster, among others. She edits Hyacinth Girl Press and co-runs FREE POEMS with Rachael Deacon.

Margaret Bashaar - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Craig Bernier has worked a range of occupations from technical writer to bartender, carpenter to dish washer, sailor to kennel cleaner.  Most recently he was employed by Duquesne University as an Instructor of Writing.  He is a graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit and was the Jacob K. Javits Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh from 2002 to 2005 where he earned his M.F.A.  Originally from southeastern Michigan, home is currently a stone’s throw from Pittsburgh, in Wilkinsburg,Pennsylvania.  His 2014 collection of short stories, Your Life Idyllic, won the St. Lawrence Book Award and was published by Black Lawrence Press.

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Romella Kitchens is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with three master's degrees in education. Her poetry has been published in 5 AM, Coal Hill Review, Main Street Rag, HEArt Online,The Autumn House Anthology The Working Poet, Chiron Review, Iodine, Mudfish Review, The Pittsburgh City Paper, and other print and online journals. She is the author of four chapbooks, Hip Hop Warrior, The Heaven of Elephants, The Immortals, and The Red Covered Bridge, and has taught children the art of poetry in public and independent schools. She is also a playwright whose plays have been performed locally by The Bodiography Dance Company and The First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh. In 2014, she was a judge for the city-wide level of Poetry OutLoud.

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Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 2000 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space. She also won the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel, and first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards judged by Gerald Stern. Leslie's poems are published in numerous journals and anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation, Connotation Press, Dogwood, Jubilat, The Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Poetry Magazine, PANK and Pearl Magazine. Leslie serves as Managing & Poetry Editor of HEArt (Human Equity through Art) Online. She works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter, Silas. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Tech in July 2008. Her third collection, SLAG was runner up for the 2014 Main Street Rag Publishing Company Book Prize and was released in December, 2014.

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Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in Brevity, The Rumpus, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Phoebe, Cream City Review, Literary Mama, Glamour Magazine and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, Dzanc’s Best of the Web and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net anthologies. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens Press, 2014), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line Press, 2012), and A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl Press, 2011). Her first full-length collection of poems, Beautiful Nerve, was published by Tiny Hardcore Press in 2014. She currently serves as editor-in-chief of The Fourth River Literary Journal, and associate editor in charge of the blog at PANK. She is associate director of the MFA program and assistant professor of English at Chatham University.

Sheila Squillante - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

Open Mic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Jimmy Cvetic Reads 'Sometimes it's more fun to rob a hunchback'

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June 2, 2015 (Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

June 2, 2015

Michael Albright has published poems in various journals and periodicals, including Loyalhanna Review, Uppagus, U.S. 1 Worksheets, The New People, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and others. He is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange and the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop. Michael lives on a windy hilltop near Greensburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Lori, and an ever-changing array of children and other animals. His chapbook, In Hall of Dead Birds and Viking Tools, was recently accepted by Finishing Line Press.

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Ann Curran is author of the book of poems, Me First (Lummox Press, 2013) and the chapbookPlacement Test. She is former long-time editor of Carnegie Mellon Magazine and staff writer for the Pittsburgh Catholic and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She holds degrees from Duquesne University. She taught at Duquesne and the Community College of Allegheny County. Her poetry has appeared in Rosebud Magazine, U.S. 1 Worksheets, The Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, Blueline, ThirdWednesday, Notre Dame Magazine, Ireland of the Welcomes, Commonweal Magazine and others, as well as the anthologies: Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh, Motif 2 Come What May and Motif 3 All the Livelong Day, Thatchwork, and Surrounded: Living With Islands. 

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Ziggy Edwards grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a BA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.  Her poems and short stories have appeared in publications including 5 AM, Paper Street, Nexus, Main Street Rag, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Ship of Fools.  She has also been a guest on the radio program, Prosody.  Ziggy's first chapbook, Hope's White Shoes.was published in 2006.  With her son Jude Rosen, she co-edits  the online journal, uppagus.

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Erin Garstka won the 1999 Taproot Literary Review Contest, and she has been a featured reader at Bloomfield Sacred Arts Festival. Her poetry has appeared in The Lyric, Mediphors, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Loyalhanna Review, and The Exchange. She and her husband Mark conduct a local poetry forum, Monroeville Poets. Invisible River Publishing released her chapbook, The Thought of a Hat (2003). 

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Christine Doreian Michaels came from England in 1971 and is a retired psychologist living inRegent 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.

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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 inMain Street Rag, Pearl, Pudding, Snowy Egret, Blueline, and other publications.

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Pam O'Brien began writing poetry at Allegheny College. 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 ofGeneral 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, was published in 2012.

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Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, a native New Yorker, taught creative writing, Classical Literature, World Mythology, and founded a Myth/Folklore Studies Center at IUP. She co-edited the prize-winning Life on the Line, and is the author of Going to Bed Whole, Tottering Palaces, The Approximate Message, and In the Fall of a Sparrow.  She has read her poems in Ireland, Greece, Mexico, Israel, Spain, andBratislava and has collaborated on 20 pieces with composers and other artists. Her work has been published in journals, magazines, and anthologies. She as received grants from the National Endowment and the Witter Bynner Foundations and was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts at IUP. Most recently, the collaborative piece, "Furoshiki" (languages that speak without words at the center) premiered in Philadelphia. Facilitator of Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, she was brought to England to be a featured writer on the BBC's "Writer from Abroad" series. In 2012 Tebot Bach published her latest book of poems, I Want to Thank My Eyes.

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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, EarthDaughters and Steam Ticket.  Her poems have also appears in both Along These Rivers and theSandburg-Livesay Anthologies.  Her latest chapbook, Remaking Driftwood was published byFinishing Line Press (2010). 

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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 PittsburghPost-Gazette, and Squirrel Hill Magazine.  She is the author of Pronouncing What We Want to Keep.

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Arlene Weiner has been a cardiology technician, a college instructor, an editor, and a research associate/member of a group developing educational software. A native of New York City, Arlene has lived in Pittsburgh for most of her adult life.  Arlene has had poems published in Pleiades, Poet Lore, The Louisville Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, anthologized in Along These Rivers, and read by Garrison Keillor on his Writer’s Almanac.  Poet Joy Katz wrote of Arlene’s collection of poems, Escape Velocity (Ragged Sky, 2006), “I want to keep my favorite of these beautifully alert, surprising poems with me as I grow old.”

Arlene Weiner - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Open Mic

Open Mic - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Jimmy Cvetic Reads "Sex Texting Will Never Understand Blue Balls"

Sex Texting Will Never Understand Blue Balls - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

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