July 28, 2026 (Johnson, Manack, Pensky, Ussia)

 

Featured Readers 

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Front Row (L-R): Joan Bauer, Jessica Manack & Miles E. Johnson

Back Row (L-R): Kristofer Collins, Matt Ussia & Nathan Pensky

Kristofer Collins has been writing about books and their authors professionally for over twenty years. He has spent the last fifteen years as the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine covering the local literary community. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Roundabout Trace published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2022. He was the publisher of Low Ghost Press from 2008-2020. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, 1839, LitHub, Belt Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Gasconade, Vox Populi, Kidsburgh, Appalachian Journal, The New Antiquarian, Jerry Jazz Musician, Uppagus, and more. He was nominated for a Robert L. Vann Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2022. He is co-curator with Joan Bauer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. The Vesper Room (Luchador Press, 2025) is his latest poetry collection. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their children. 

Opening Comments by Kristofer Collins - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). With Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, she co-edited the award-winning international anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005). Over 350 of her poems have been published in journals, periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics and Nature. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

 

Additional Opening Comments by Joan Bauer - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Miles E. Johnson is a 2024 Cave Canem Fellow and 2024 Tin House participant, and graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program in poetry. Miles is a journalist and essayist by training, a poet by lived experience. Miles believes the world would be better off if there were no borders at all, but simultaneously reps his home, Washington D.C., with fervor and gratitude. Miles loves his Granny and all the other Black folks who watch out and over him, following NBA basketball, and writing about video games. You can find (some of) their work in the NPR & Mother Jones archives, and at blackandoutside.com. 

Miles E. Johnson - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)    

 

Jessica Manack lives with her family in the North Side of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Still: The Journal, SWWIM Every Day, and Fine Print, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a Curious Creators Grant and a Getaway Artist Fellowship, and serves as a Poetry Reader for  for TriQuarterly and Engagement Editor for the Pittsburgh Review of Books. Gastromythology is her first book. Keep up with her work at http://www.jessicamanack.com 

 

Jessica Manack - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)     

 

Nathan Pensky is a writer and academic living in Pittsburgh, currently an adjunct professor of English at University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne University, and La Roche University. His first academic book Cartesian Theaters, Shakespearean Minds was published with Edinburgh University Press, and he has published both nonfiction and fiction widely elsewhere, including with The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, McSweeney's, DIAGRAM, Maudlin House, and others. He co-hosts the bi-weekly books and culture podcast Third Person Limited and writes a column for The Pittsburgh Review of Books.

 

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Matthew Ussia is director of Duquesne University’s First Year Writing Program in spite of the fact that he got a C- in freshman writing and was rejected from Duquesne’s MA program.  He is also an editor, scholar, podcaster, post-doom thereminist, and softcore punk.  His first book, The Red Glass Cat, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2021. His second book, Saturday Night on Earth, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025.  www.matthewussia.com. 

 

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Open Mic

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Bonus Image from July 25, 2017

      A crowdsourced tableau vivant that recreates Caravaggio's Apotheosis of the Kneeling Supplicant

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July 14, 2026 (Garstka, Ramirez, Reed)

Featured Readers 

 

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Front Row (L-R): Erin Garstka, Adriana Ramirez & Joan Bauer

Back Row (L-R): Kristofer Collins & Margaret Kasper Reed

Kristofer Collins has been writing about books and their authors professionally for over twenty years. He has spent the last fifteen years as the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine covering the local literary community. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Roundabout Trace published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2022. He was the publisher of Low Ghost Press from 2008-2020. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, 1839, LitHub, Belt Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Gasconade, Vox Populi, Kidsburgh, Appalachian Journal, The New Antiquarian, Jerry Jazz Musician, Uppagus, and more. He was nominated for a Robert L. Vann Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2022. He is co-curator with Joan Bauer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. The Vesper Room (Luchador Press, 2025) is his latest poetry collection. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their children. 

Opening Comments by Kristofer Collins - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). With Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, she co-edited the award-winning international anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005). Over 350 of her poems have been published in journals, periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics and Nature. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

 

Additional Opening Comments by Joan Bauer - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Erin Garstka is a retired home health occupational therapist. Invisible River Publishing released her chapbook, The Thought of a Hat in 2003. For some years, she and her husband Mark Garstka, led the Monroeville Poets Workshop. She is a longtime member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, a past winner of the Taproot Prize and the 2023 winner of the Westmoreland Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared recently in The Lyric, California Quarterly, and Time of Singing.

 

Erin Garstka - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)    

Adriana E. Ramírez is a columnist, author, critic, and 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). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub among others.  Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh 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, was published by Scribner in April 2026. In recent years, she has written twice a week for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Adriana Ramírez - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)     

Margaret Kasper Reed’s poetry collections include Lament’s Grocery (Foothills Press) and Children of the Sky, an ekphrastic collection with artist Kathleen Huddle (Author House Press). She has published in numerous journals including Poet Lore, The English Journal and Rattle. Anthologies she has contributed to include 99 Poems on Joy, edited by Roger Housden and The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain, edited by Doralee Brooks. With pianist Gwen Beckman, she collaborated on Into Blue an original theatre production combining piano and poetry. She taught English in public high school and was an adjunct in the theatre department at Elmira College.

Margaret Kasper Reed - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)     

Open Mic

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Entire Event from Start to Finish

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June 23, 2026 (Choi, Esaias, Peebles, St. John & Walker)

 Featured Readers 

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Front Row (L-R): Joan Bauer

Back Row (L-R): Kristofer Collins, Rick St. John, Lamont Walker, Timons Esaias, Cate Peebles & Chiwan Choi

Kristofer Collins has been writing about books and their authors professionally for over twenty years. He has spent the last fifteen years as the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine covering the local literary community. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Roundabout Trace published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2022. He was the publisher of Low Ghost Press from 2008-2020. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, 1839, LitHub, Belt Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Gasconade, Vox Populi, Kidsburgh, Appalachian Journal, The New Antiquarian, Jerry Jazz Musician, Uppagus, and more. He was nominated for a Robert L. Vann Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2022. He is co-curator with Joan Bauer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. The Vesper Room (Luchador Press, 2025) is his latest poetry collection. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their children. 

Opening Comments by Kristofer Collins - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). With Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, she co-edited the award-winning international anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005). Over 350 of her poems have been published in journals, periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics and Nature. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

 

Additional Opening Comments by Joan Bauer - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Richard St. John is a nationally-published poet whose newest collection of poetry, Book of Entangled Souls, was published in June 2022 by Broadstone Books. His other books include 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). His work has also appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He has read widely across the country, connecting not only with literary audiences but with listeners new to poetry. For more go to: www.richardstjohnpoet.com

 

Richard St. John - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)    

 

Timons Esaias is a sporadically award-winning satirist, writer and poet living in Pittsburgh. His works, ranging from literary to genre, have been published in twenty-two languages. He has been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award and the Seiun Award, twice won the Asimov’;s Readers Award, and won the Winter Anthology Contest for 2020. His story, ”Norbert and the System,” has appeared in a textbook, and in college curricula. He was shortlisted for the Gregory O. Donoghue International Poetry Prize. He is a Pushcart nominee and Intrepid Award winner for the story, “To Do.”  His full-length Louis-Award-winning collection of poetry – Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek -- was brought out by Concrete Wolf. Scholars are convinced that Walter de la Mare’s 1918 poem, “Poor Tired Tim! It’s sad for him,” was written about him. 

 

 Timons Esaias - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

 

Cate Peebles is the author of two poetry collections, Thicket (Lost Roads Press, 2018) and The Haunting (Tupelo Press, 2025), and five chapbooks, including Sun King, winner of the 2024 Tomaž Salamun Prize from Factory Hollow Press, and The Woodlands, winner of the 2016 Sixth Finch chapbook contest. Her poetry has appeared widely in print and online literary magazines such as The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, diode, Fence, Ploughshares, Tin House, and Volt. She is coeditor of the online poetry magazine Fou. Her writing has been awarded grants from The Academy of American Poets and the Vermont Studio Center.

Cate Peebles - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

 

Chiwan Choi is the author of six books of poetry: The Flood, the Daughter trilogy—Abductions, The Yellow House and my name is wolf—Sky Songs and birthdays. He wrote, presented and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Zócalo Public Square and other publications. Chiwan is a partner at the experimental literary laboratory Writ Large Projects. For more: http://www.chiwanchoi.com  

 

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Marcel Lamont (M.L.) Walker is an award-winning graphic-prose creator and authority in social applications for comic-book art. In 2017, he was voted Best Local Cartoonist by readers of The Pittsburgh City Paper, and in 2018, he was awarded a BMe ("bee-mee") Community Genius Fellowship in recognition of his work in the arts. His clients have included The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, WYEP and others. In 2024, he was designated a Pittsburgh Cultural Treasure by The Heinz Endowments and the Ford and POISE Foundations. He continues to work with educators and students across the country to promote the use of literature and visual art as forces for social good.

Lamont Walker - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download) 

 

Open Mic

 

No Open Mic this week. 

Entire Event from Start to Finish

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June 9, 2026 (Bacharach, Sachdeva, Irwin, Rankine & Jung)

 Featured Readers 

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Front Row (L-R): Anjali Sachdeva, Rebecca Jung & Jason Irwin

Back Row (L-R): Kristofer Collins, Camille Rankine, Valerie Bacharach & Joan Bauer

Kristofer Collins has been writing about books and their authors professionally for over twenty years. He has spent the last fifteen years as the Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine covering the local literary community. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Roundabout Trace published by Kung Fu Treachery Press in 2022. He was the publisher of Low Ghost Press from 2008-2020. His writing has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The New Yinzer, 1839, LitHub, Belt Magazine, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Gasconade, Vox Populi, Kidsburgh, Appalachian Journal, The New Antiquarian, Jerry Jazz Musician, Uppagus, and more. He was nominated for a Robert L. Vann Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2022. He is co-curator with Joan Bauer of the long-running Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series. The Vesper Room (Luchador Press, 2025) is his latest poetry collection. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their children. 

Opening Comments by Kristofer Collins - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). With Judith Robinson and Sankar Roy, she co-edited the award-winning international anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts and Rupa & Co, 2005). Over 350 of her poems have been published in journals, periodicals and anthologies in the US and abroad. Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Vox Populi: A Curated Webspace for Poetry, Politics and Nature. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor. She now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

 

Additional Opening Comments by Joan Bauer - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. Her poem, “Birthday Portrait, Son,” published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.  

Valerie Bacharach - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)    

 

Jason Irwin is the author of the memoir These Fragments I Have Shored, as well as three poetry collections, most recently, The History of Our Vagrancies. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, writer Jen Ashburn.

 

Jason Irwin - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)      

Camille Rankine is the author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses, published by Copper Canyon Press, and the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Discovery Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Hawthornden Foundation, and MacDowell. She serves as co-chair of the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council, and is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.  For more: www.camillerankine.com

Camille Rankine - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)   

 

Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was the winner of the he 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. Her stories have been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Vogue India, and featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Investing in Professional Artists grant from the Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation.  She currently teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University.

 

Anjali Sachdeva - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)     

 

Rebecca Jung grew up an expat due to her father’s work, living in ten different countries within a span of ten years. Her work has been published in literary magazines, including: Sky Island Journal, Memoir, The Impetus, Pennsylvania Review, Evening Street Review, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Not Very Quiet, The Write Launch, Prometheus Dreaming, Purple Clover, and The Bangalore Review. Her work has also appeared in Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh, and Burningword Ninety-Nine, A Selected Anthology of Poetry, 2001- 2011, and numerous other anthologies. She earned her B.A. in English writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and a B.A. in art history from Kent State University. 

 

Rebecca Jung - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download) 

 

Open Mic

 

No Open Mic this week. 

Entire Event from Start to Finish

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