Featured Readers
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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.
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.
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 - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)
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