July 12, 2022 (McNaugher, St. John, Ellis, Obisie-Orlu & Wentworth)

Featured Readers 

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Seated: Joan Bauer & Angele Ellis 

Standing L-R: Don Wentworth, Danielle Obisie-Orlu, Kristofer Collins, Heather McNaugher & Richard St. John 

 

Special thanks to Anna Claire Weber of White Whale Bookstore for hosting and recording this event.

Note that a link for the entire reading is available at the bottom of this post.

Kristofer Collins is the longtime Books Editor for Pittsburgh Magazine. He is the co-curator of The Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series. His latest book The River Is Another Kind of Prayer: New & Selected Poems was published in 2020 by Kung Fu Treachery Press. His latest project, The Pittsburgh Book Review can be found at https://pittsburghbookreview.blogspot.com/. He lives in Stanton Heights with his wife, son and daughter.

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

Heather McNaugher is the author of four poetry collections and the inaugural winner of the 2021 Southern Humanities editor’s chapbook prize for fiction for her story collection, States of Emergency. She teaches at Chatham University, where she is nonfiction editor of The Fourth River.

Heather McNaugher - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)   

Richard St. John’s newest poetry collection is Book of Entangled Souls (Broadstone Books, 2022).  He is also the author of The Pure Inconstancy of Grace (published by Truman State University Press in 2005 as first runner-up for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), Each Perfected Name (Truman State University Press, 2015), and Shrine (a long poem released as a chapbook in 2011.)  St. John lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and enjoys connecting not only with university and literary audiences, but also with listeners new to poetry.  For more information, please visit his website: www.richardstjohnpoet.com.   

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

Angele Ellis’ writing has appeared on a theatre marquee—after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest—and in over seventy journals and seventeen anthologies. She is a staff writer for Cultural Daily; her reviews also are featured in Al Jadid Magazine and Vox Populi. Angele is author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems on her heritage won a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook), and Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a poetry/flash fiction hybrid inspired by her adopted city of Pittsburgh, with photographs by Rebecca Clever.

Angele Ellis - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)     

Danielle Obisie-Orlu is a Nigerian-American student, actress and poet who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is is the Youth Poet Laureate of Allegheny County 2021-22, a program of City of Asylum. She is a trained public speaker, receiving accolades in speech, drama, and debate. She attends the University of Pittsburgh and is double majoring in International & Area Studies and Political Science, with minors in Sociology and French. She is devoted to fostering environments of intersectional community, belonging, and empowerment. She is passionate about migration, belonging, and international human rights law; partners with ARYSE to empower migrant youth and refugee voices; and is a student leader on her campus.

Danielle Obisie-Orlu - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)   

Don Wentworth is a Pittsburgh-based poet whose work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life. His haiku, ghazals, and tanka have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Modern Haiku, Gargoyle, Frogpond, Chiron Review, and Rolling Stone. Six Gallery Press published 3 full-length poetry collections: Past All Traps (2011), Yield to the Willow (2014), and With a Deepening Presence (2016). He collaborated with the British poet, Joy McCall, on a tan-renga sequence, Touching the Now (Skylark Publications, 2018). twenty-seven sparrows, a haiku chapbook, is available from Grackle and Crow (2021).

Don Wentworth - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)  

Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008) and The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2020). For some years, she was a teacher and counselor in public and independent schools. In 2007, she won the Earle Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International and in 2018, she was a finalist for the John Ciardi Poetry Prize from BkMk Press. Since 2001, more than 250 of her poems have been published and three have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Joan co-curates the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins. Her new book of poetry, Fig Season, is forthcoming from Turning Point in 2023.

Closing Remarks by Joan E. Bauer - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

The Entire Reading

The Whole Thing - Click to Play (Right-Click to Download)

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