July 30, 2019 (The Grand Finale)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

July 30, 2019

Featured Readers

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 Standing L-R: Jen Ashburn, Deesha Philyaw, Meghan Tutolo, Adriana Ramirez & Joan Bauer

Seated L-R: Kristofer Collins, Ellen McGrath Smith, Don Wentworth & Jason Baldinger

Kristofer Collins Opens With a Learned Disquisition on the Definition of Poetry 

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Kris Then Pivots to Read a Poem by Jimmy Cvetic 

Kristofer Collins (Again) - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download  

Joan Bauer Follows Up With an Expression of Gratitude 

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Deena November is the author of Mean Mama (Main Street Rag, 2017) She has edited two anthologies, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres (Lascaux Editions, 2017) and I Just Hope It's Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Co. Her poetry has appeared in Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Women Write Resistance, Keyhole Magazine, Mom Egg Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her chapbook Dick Wad was published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2012. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Carlow University where she then taught in the English and Women’s Studies programs. Deena teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Communications at Robert Morris University and curates the Staghorn Poetry Series. Deena enjoys strolling through the gardens of Phipps with her toddlers and baby.

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Jen Ashburn is the author of The Light on the Wall (Main Street Rag, 2016) and has work published in numerous venues, including the podcast The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Her poem “Our Mother Drove Barefoot” was selected for the 2018 Public Poetry Project by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book and distributed on posters across the state. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she taught creative writing to women in the Allegheny County Jail through Chatham’s Words Without Walls program. She’s currently working on her second full-length poetry collection, tentatively titled Our Own Thin Ways, and a memoir.

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Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A recent Writer in Residence and Osage Arts Community, he has three recent books, This Useless Beauty (Alien Buddha Press) and the split books The Ugly Side of the Lake with John Dorsey (Night Ballet Press) as well as Little Fires Hiding with James Benger (Kung Fu Treachery Press). His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp on lps by the band Theremonster and The Gotobeds.

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Deesha Philyaw is a Pittsburgh-based writer. Her fiction and nonfiction writing on race, gender, sex and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, The Cheat River Review, The Baltimore Review, dead housekeeping, Bitch, Apogee Journal, and other publications. She’s a Fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a native Floridian.

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Adriana E. Ramírez is a Mexican-Colombian writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and in 2016 she was named Critic at Large for the Los Angeles Times Book Section. Her essays and poems have also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, Literary Hub, Convolution, HEArt, Apogee, and on Nerve.com. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she cofounded the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

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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 from Zone 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 book, Nobody's Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press.

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Meghan Tutolo is an artist and copywriter from Pittsburgh, PA. When she isn't writing romance for olives and pasta or grading essays, she can be found cruising around on her pipsqueak motorcycle or holed up at home with her smoothy faced cats—writing and making things. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Weave, Main Street Rag, Nerve Cowboy and Free State Review—among others. Her first chapbook, Little As Living, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014.

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Don Wentworth's work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in every day life. His poetry has appeared in Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, Frogpond, and Rolling Stone, as well as a number of anthologies. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections published by Six Gallery Press: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016). Past All Traps was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation's 2011 Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. His poem “hiding” was selected as one of “100 Notable Haiku” of 2013 by Modern Haiku Press. Don has two new poetry books forthcoming: a collection of ghazals from Low Ghost and a collaborative collection of tanka written with the British haiku poet, Joy McCall. Since 1989, he has been the editor and publisher of Lilliput Review.

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July 23, 2019 (Carson, Esgalhado, McDermott & Stupp)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

July 23, 2019

Featured Readers

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Standing L-R: Sharon Fagan McDermott, Tony Norman, Joan Bauer & Barbara Duarte Esgalhado

Seated L-R: Kristofer Collins, John Stupp & Jay Carson

Tony Norman (yes, that Tony Norman) Opens With Poems by Jimmy Cvetic 

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A seventh generation Pittsburgher, Jay Carson taught creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University for many years, where he was a University Professor and a faculty advisor to the student literary journal, Rune. Jay regularly presents, reads, and publishes. More than 100 of his poems have appeared in local and national literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, and he also writes short stories. He co-edited with Judith Robinson a collection of Margaret Menamin’s poetry entitled, The Snow Falls Up. Jay has published a chapbook, Irish Coffee, with Coal Hill Review. A full-length book of his poems entitled The Cinnamon of Desire was published by Main Street Rag in 2012. Jay considers his work accessible, the problem-solving spiritual survival of a raging youth - and just what you might need.

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Barbara Duarte Esgalhado received a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University, where she focused on the creative process, and an M.F.A. in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College with an emphasis on poetry. She works as a psychologist with chronically and terminally ill people and has taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the Department of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies. She is strongly inspired by things Portuguese and by growing up in two languages. She wrote her dissertation on Portugal modernist poet, Fernando Pessoa, and the relationship between writing and subjectivity. Her writing has been published in literary and academic journals and has been included in several anthologies. She now lives in Pittsburgh and works at the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Infectious Disease's HIV outpatient clinic. Her full-length book of poetry, Saudades Tuas: I Miss You, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018.

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Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent collection of poetry, Life Without Furniture, was published by Jacar Press in May 2018. Additionally, Fagan McDermott has published three chapbook collections, Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, 2005), and Bitter Acoustic, which won the 2011 Jacar Press Chapbook contest. Her poems have been published widely in journals including Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and Seneca Review, as well as in anthologies. Fagan McDermott has been a recipient of both a Pittsburgh Foundation Artist Award and a PA Council on the Arts grant. 

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John Stupp’s third poetry collection, Pawleys Island, was published in 2017. His manuscript Summer Job won the 2017 Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Prize and was published in August 2018. A forthcoming chapbook When Billy Conn Fought Fritzie Zivic will be published by Red Flag Poetry this winter.  He lives in Sewickley, Pennsylvania.  From 1975-1985 he worked professionally as a mediocre jazz guitarist.  

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Open Mic (With Ja-Leia Washington, Charlie Brice, Judy Brice, Antonia Glen, Scott Silsbe & Pat McArdle)

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July 16, 2019 (LoTempio, Russell & Emanuel)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

July 16, 2019

Featured Readers

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Standing L-R: Lynn Emanuel & Joan Bauer

Seated L-R: Lauren Russell, Kristofer Collins & Lucia LoTempio

Charlie Deitch (yes, that Charlie Deitch) Opens With a Poem by Jimmy Cvetic

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Lucia LoTempio is the author of Hot with the Bad Things (Alice James Books 2020). She hails from Buffalo, NY and left to earn an MFA in poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. You can find her poems in Passages North, The Journal, TYPO, Quarterly West, as part of the Academy of American Poets poem-a-day series, and elsewhere. With Suzannah Russ Spaar, she co-authored the chapbook Undone in Scarlet (Tammy 2019). Lucia still lives and writes in Pittsburgh, and she works at City of Asylum as a program manager.

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Lauren Russell, assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, is a research assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her first full-length book, What’s Hanging on the Hush, was published by Ahsahta Press in 2017. A Cave Canem fellow, she was the 2014-2015 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the 2016 VIDA Fellow to the Home School, and she was recently awarded a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Russell's chapbook Dream-Clung, Gone came out from Brooklyn Arts Press in 2012, and her work has appeared in boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Tarpaulin Sky, Bettering American Poetry 2015, among others. Russell holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she served as co-editor-in-chief of Hot Metal Bridge and received a Distinguished Teaching Award in the English Department.

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Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry, Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly--, Noose and Hook, and, most recently, The Nerve Of It : Poems New and Selected. Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry numerous times and is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has been a judge for the National Book Awards and has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and the Bennington College Low Residency MFA program. She is the recipient of numerous awards including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Poetry Series Award, the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets and most recently, a fellowship from the Ranieri Foundation. She is Professor Emerita of the Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Open Mic (With Stuart Sheppard, Harmony Mohr, Paul Z & Don Krieger) 

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July 9, 2019 (Krygowski, St. John & Hazo)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

July 9, 2019

Featured Readers

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Standing: Joan Bauer

Seated L-R: Richard St. John, Nancy Krygowski, Samuel Hazo & Kristofer Collins

Opening (Entertaining) Remarks by Kristofer Collins

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Kayla Sargeson Reads a Poem by Jimmy Cvetic

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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 Literacy Pittsburgh (formerly the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council).

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Richard St. John is the author of Each Perfected Name (Truman State University Press, 2015), The Pure Inconstancy of Grace (published in 2005 by Truman State University Press, as first runner-up for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), and Shrine (a long poem released as a chapbook in 2011). For more information, please visit his website: www.richardstjohnpoet.com.

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Samuel Hazo is the author of poetry, fiction, essays, various works of translation and four plays. Governor Robert Casey named him Pennsylvania’s first State Poet 1993. He served until 2003. From his first book, through the National Book Award finalist Once for the Last Bandit, to his newest poems, he explores themes of mortality and love, passion and art, courage and grace in a style that is unmistakably his own. As the founder and Director/President of the International Poetry Forum, Dr. Hazo brought more than 800 poets and performers to Pittsburgh. Dr. Hazo is a former captain in the Marine Corps and the McAnulty Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University. He has received twelve honorary degrees, is an honorary Phi Beta Kappa member, and has been awarded the Hazlett Award for Excellence in Literature from the Governor of Pennsylvania, the Forbes Medal, the Elizabeth Kray Award for Outstanding Service to Poetry from New York University, and the Griffin Award from the University of Notre Dame. His book, Just Once, received the Maurice English Poetry Prize. His new collection, When Not Yet Is Now, is forthcoming from Franciscan University Press in 2019. 

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Open Mic (With Matt Ussia, Michelle Maher, Sawyer Braun & Paul Z) 

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July 2, 2019 (Dil, Nikolov, Robinson & Wurster)

Hemingway's Poetry Series

July 2, 2019

Featured Readers

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Standing L-R: Shaheen Dil, Joan Bauer, Judith Robinson & Jason Baldinger

Seated L-R: Geo Nikolov, Lyubomir Nikolov, Kristofer Collins & Michael Wurster

Jason Baldinger Opens With a Poem by Jimmy Cvetic

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Shaheen Dil was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but has led a peripatetic life.  She has spent time in many parts of the United States and traveled throughout the world.  Shaheen has worked in both academia and business, but poetry has always been her avocation.  She currently resides in New York City and Pittsburgh. Her first book of poetry, Acts of Deference, was published recently by Fakel Publishing House in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

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The recipient of the third annual Settlement House American Poetry Prize, Lyubomir Nikolov was born in 1954 in Kireevo, Bulgaria. He worked for 10 years as an editor of Literary Forum, a weekly newspaper of the Bulgarian Writers Union. In 1991 Nikolov came to the United States and has lived in Montgomery County, Maryland since 1992. He is author of nine previous poetry collections in Bulgaria, the United States, Argentina and Austria. Idle Lava is the first of his books published in Bulgaria and translated in full into English.

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Judith R. Robinson is an editor, teacher, fiction writer, poet and visual artist. A 1980 summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she has published 75+ poems, five poetry collections, one fiction collection; one novel; edited or co-edited eleven poetry collections. Teacher: Osher at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her newest collection, Carousel, was published in January, 2017, Lummox Press. Her newest gallery exhibit, The Numbers Keep Changing, has been on display at The Pittsburgh Holocaust Center, April through June, 2019. 

For publication info & credits, art exhibitions, awards, including Pushcart nomination, Best Chapbook-Dec, 2015, on request or at: www.judithrrobinson.com

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Michael Wurster has lived in Pittsburgh since 1964 and is a founding member of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. For 17 years, 1993-2010, he taught at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School. In 2009, his book, The British Detective, was published by Main Street Rag. His 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), and The Brentwood Anthology (Lummox Press, 2014). 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. His new collection, Even Then: Poems, was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019.

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Open Mic (With Dean Hazelton, Janette Schafer, Judy Brice, Charlie Brice, Mark Sepe, Paul Z, Stuart Sheppard, Alyssa Sineni and Geo Nikolov) 

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