June 25, 2013 (Kelly, Linder, Deahl, Wurster)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 25, 2013

Sheila Kelly is a retired psychotherapist, poet and playwright. She is a member of the Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshops, Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange and a regular facilitator for the Pittsburgh Writers’ Studio. Three of Sheila’s plays received staged readings at the 2009 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival. She has worked for many years with gifted middle school writers and published the annual, St. Bede’s Quill. Most recent work appears in Brief Encounters: Ekphrases from the Spinning Plate Gallery. Other poems upcoming in Voices from the Attic: Volume XIX.

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Norma West Linder was born in Toronto during 1928, but spent her childhood on Manitoulin Island and her teenage years in Muskoka. She is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, International PEN, and The Ontario Poetry Society. She was a founding member of Writers in Transition and served as President of the Sarnia Branch of the Canadian Authors Association. Linder is the author of five novels, fourteen collections of poetry, a memoir of Manitoulin Island, a children’s book, and a biography of Pauline McGibbon. For twenty-four years she was on the faculty of Lambton College, teaching English and Creative Writing. Her short stories have been published internationally, are widely anthologized, and have been broadcast on CBC radio.  Her books of poetry include: On the Side of the Angels, Ring Around the Sun, Pyramid, The Rooming House, River of Lethe: A Journey Through Alzheimer’s and When Angels Weep, among others.

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James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands region of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970. He is the author (or, in the case of Tu Fu, translator) of twenty-two literary titles, including No Star Is Lost and If Ever Two Were One. A cycle of his poems is the focus of a one-hour TV special, Under the Watchful Eye (Silver Falls Video Productions, 1993). The audiotape of Under the Watchful Eye was released by Broken Jaw Press in September, 1995. These have been reissued on CD and DVD by Silver Falls. In addition to his writing, he has taught creative writing and Canadian literature at the high school, college, and university levels. He no longer teaches, and for the past dozen years has mostly been a full-time writer/editor/translator. As a critic and literary historian, Deahl is the leading Acornic scholar. James Deahl lives in Sarnia, Canada.

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Michael Wurster has lived in Pittsburgh since 1962 and is a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchanged.  For 17 years, 1993-2010, he taught at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School.  He is author or co-editor of four published books, including The Snake Charmer’s Daughter (ELEMENOPE, 2000) and The British Detective (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2009).  Newer work is recent or forthcoming in 5 AM, California Quarterly, and Descant. 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.

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Open Mic

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June 18, 2013 (Edelman, Flick, McIlroy)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 18, 2013

Barbara Edelman is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Girl in Water, from Parallel Press. Her poems and prose have appeared in various journals, among them, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, 5 AM, and Arts & Letters, and in several anthologies. She has received a PA Council on the Arts grant in poetry and residency fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Sherrie Flick is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books) and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume). Her flash fiction appears in many journals and anthologies including Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward and New Sudden Fiction. She teaches Food Writing, a variety of fiction workshops, and Readings in Fiction in Chatham University’s MFA program and writes a regular food column for Pittsburgh Quarterly magazine. Co-founder of Into the Furnace, a writer-in-residence program in Braddock, Pa., she also serves as series editor for At Table, the food writing book list at University of Nebraska Press.

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Leslie Anne McIlroy won the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her full-length collection Rare Space and the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for her chapbook Gravel. She also took first place in the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards Competition judged by Gerald Stern. Her second full-length book, Liquid Like This, was published by Word Press in 2008. Leslie’s poetry appears in numerous publications including Dogwood, The Mississippi Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose & Poetry, Pearl and forthcoming in Barely South Review. Leslie works as a copywriter in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her daughter Silas.

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Open Mic

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June 11, 2013 (McDermott, St. John, Carson, Carter-Jones)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 11, 2013

Sharon McDermott is a poet, who teaches in the upper school of Winchester Thurston School. She is the author of three small collections of poetry: Voluptuous (Ultima Obscura Press), Alley Scatting (Parallel Press, U. of Wisconsin) and most recently, Bitter Acoustic (2012, Jacar Press.) McDermott is a past recipient of both an artist grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation and a PA Council on the Arts grant. She is also a musician, who likes to mix music into her poetry readings whenever possible.

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Rick St. John studied English at Princeton University (B.A.) and the University of Virginia (M.A.). Following 20 years of work in community development, Rick completed a mid-career Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University, and then founded and directed "Conversations for Common Wealth,” which used poetry and other materials to help small groups of citizens connect across difference and reflect on their own contributions to the common good. His poems have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, 5 a.m., Poet Lore, Sewanee Review and many other periodicals.  His book, The Pure Inconstancy of Grace was published in 2005 by Truman State University Press. For some years, Rick was Executive Director of Autumn House Press, a non-profit literary publishing house based in Pittsburgh.  He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Kate. 

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A seventh generation Pittsburgher, Jay Carson teaches creative writing, literature, and rhetoric at Robert Morris University, where he is a University Professor and a faculty advisor to the student literary journal, Rune. Active professionally, Jay regularly presents, reads, and publishes in local and national venues. More than 60 of his poems have appeared in national literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. He has also co-edited with Judith Robinson a collection of Margaret Menamin's poetry entitled, The Snow Falls Up. His first full-length book of poetry, Cinnamon of Desire, was published in 2013 by Main Street Rag. Jay has also published a chapbook, Irish Coffee, with Coal Hill Review. Jay considers his poetry Appalachian, Irish, accessible, and the problem-solving spiritual survival of a raging, youth -- and just what you might need.

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Sheila Carter-Jones has been described by Herbert Woodward Martin as one who writes with "immediacy of tone, voice and language." Much of her work to date charts in images and music the lived experiences of a small-town girl brought up in a house across from the boney dump of Republic Steel Coal Mines outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has been published in Pennsylvania Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Tri-State Anthology, Blair Mountain Press and Flights. Grace Cavalieri, producer and host of "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" says that Sheila's recent book Blackberry Cobbler Song premiers a narrative poet in the greatest tradition of American storytellers.

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Open Mic

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June 4, 2013 (Hatcher, Hirsch, Karasek, Bauer)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

June 04, 2013

Roberta Hatcher teaches French at Duquesne University, and her research has involved French-language literatures from the world beyond France, in particular post-independence literatures of sub-Saharan Africa. She is also interested in African cinema, postcolonial studies, and the emerging field of French Atlantic studies. She has read in a number of poetry venues in Pittsburgh, and recently participated in a session of "Border Crossing Poetry" at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference held in Montreal. She was a 2009 finalist for the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and is currently working on a manuscript titled French Lessons.

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As a youngster, Gene Hirsch studied “New” music with Stefan Wolpe. He received an MD degree with an academic career in Cardiology, Geriatrics, and Humanities in Medicine.  He has written poetry since medical school with poems appearing in medical journals, anthologies, Crossing Limits, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and others.  In 1992, Gene initiated a writing program at the John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC, in which he teaches and has produced five anthologies featuring students and an active poetry community.  He has been resident poet at the folk school, Consortium Ethics Program (Univ. Pitt.), and Forbes Hospice.  He attends the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. 

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Joseph Karasek performed as an actor and violinist with The Theater Within, an improvisational theater group in New York City.  A former violist with the National Orchestral Association, he created school orchestras on the elementary and secondary levels., and taught music composition and music theory at Long Island University.  Living in Pittsburgh, Pa since, 1991, he has taught philosophy at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Carnegie Mellon University.  Several years ago, he led a study group on James Joyce's Ulysses there.  His poetry has been published in Only the Sea Keeps:  Poetry of the Tsunami (Bayeux Arts), and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets.  His two books of poetry, Beyond Waking, and Love and the Ten Thousand Things, were published by Tebot Bach in 2009.  

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Joan E. Bauer is the author of The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including 5 AM, Cider Press Review, Pearl, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, Slipstream, US 1 Worksheets, and more than a dozen anthologies, Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Along These Rivers: Poetry and Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach), and Voices from the Attic (Carlow University Press), among them. In 2007, her poem, "Sleepers," won the Earl Birney Poetry Prize from Prism International.  Joan divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she curates the Hemingway Summer Poetry Series with Jimmy Cvetic.

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May 28, 2013 (Norman, D'Haene, Gainey, Beatty)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

May 28, 2013

Liane Ellison Norman's recent book of poems, Breathing the West: Great Basin Poems, was published by Bottom Dog Press in the fall of 2012, a year in which a chapbook, Driving Near the Old Federal Arsenal, was released by Finishing Line Press. Norman has published individual poems in the North American Review, Kestrel, The Fourth River, 5 AM, Grasslimb, Rune, Hot Metal Press and in Voices From the Attic and Come Together: Imagine Peace anthologies. She won the Wisteria Prize for poetry in 2006 from Paper Journey Press and has published two earlier books of poetry, The Duration of Grief and Keep, a book about nonviolent protest against nuclear bomb parts makers, Mere Citizens: United, Civil and Disobedient, a biography, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight, a novel, Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother, and many articles, essays and reviews.

Recording not available

Elise D’Haene is a novelist, screenwriter, and editor. Her first novel, Licking Our Wounds (Permanent Press), won the Small Press Book Award at Book Expo in Chicago. She won the Hemingway Award for her short story, “Married.” She has published several short stories and co-wrote a four book series of erotica, Red Shoe Diaries, for the Penguin Group. Among her screen credits, she was a writer for The Little Mermaid II (Disney) and penned several episodes of the Showtime series, Red Shoe Diaries. She teaches screenwriting at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, and holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Southern California.

Recording not available

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 early 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 University and an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Carlow University. A native Californian, she now resides in Pittsburgh.

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Jan Beatty’s new book, The Switching/Yard was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2013.  Other books include Red Sugar (2008, U of Pgh Press) Boneshaker (2002, U. of Pgh. Press) and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Ravenous, her limited edition chapbook, won the 1995 State Street Prize. Beatty’s poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Iowa Press. Awards include the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For the past thirteen years, she has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR-affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers. Beatty directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and teaches in the MFA program.

Recording not available

May 21, 2013 (Roffman, Weiner, Ruiz, O'Brien, Minnich, Edwards, Curran)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

May 21, 2013

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, facilitator of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, taught creative writing, myth and literature and started a Myth/Folklore Studies Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She co-edited the prize-winning anthology Life on the Line and is author of Going to Bed Whole, Tottering Palaces and The Approximate Message. She has read her poems in Ireland, Greece, Mexico, Israel, Spain and the Czech Republic and was a featured writer on the BBC's "Writer from Abroad" series. Her work has been published in Centennial Review, Riverrun, MacGuffin, Main Street Rag and the Pittsburgh Quarterly and she is the recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award in the Arts at IUP. Over the years, she has been involved in 23 collaborations, often with artists and dancers. Her book of poetry, I Want to Thank My Eyes, was published by Tebot Bach in April 2012.

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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.”

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Miguel Ruiz is a native of Los Angeles who now lives in Pittsburgh with his soon-to-be wife, Lauren. Though he makes his living as a member of PNC's Strategic Initiatives Office, Miguel has written poetry since middle school. He strives to mesh both lyrical and objectivist sensibilities, while examining people, places, and thoughts. Miguel studied at Loyola Marymount University and Harvard Business School.

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Pam O'Brien began writing poetry at Allegheny College and was hooked once her strange response to The Beatles' “Strawberry Fields Forever” was published in the literary magazine. 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 of General 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, will be released by Dos Madres Press in 2012.

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

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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 Confluence, Paper Street, Pittsburgh City Paper, Nexus, Main Street Rag, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 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.

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Ann Curran is author of the chapbook Placement 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, Third Wednesday, 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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May 14, 2013 (James, Lin, Noll, Pasinski, Peterson, Stevens, Wolfe)

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series

May 14, 2013

Nancy Esther James has had her poems published in various journals and literary magazines including Christianity and Literature, Time of Singing, and Poet Lore, as well as in other publications such as Friends Journal and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  Her poem, “To a Friend,” originally published in Christianity and Literature, was reprinted in the 2003 Poet’s Market.  Her collection of poems, No Time to Hurry, was published by Dawn Valley Press (Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA) in 1979. She has taught poetry workshops at the St. Davids Christian Writers Conference and The Writing Academy Seminar and has judged poetry contests for St. Davids and for the Pittsburgh Poetry Society. Her chapbook, Resilient Spirit: Poems for Lorraine, was published in March 2013 by Finishing Line Press. 

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Jeen-Shang Lin currently teaches civil engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote poems in his youthful days during college. Only in the past few years did he start writing again, an indisputable living proof that inhaling enough Pittsburgh air is a sufficient condition for becoming a poet. However, he only has a small repertoire; it could be that his professional writing is smothering the poetry in him, or more plausibly, he simply writes at the pace of a snail crawling.

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Marilyn Marsh Noll, earned her MFA in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C. in 1994. Her poems have appeared in the Comstock Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Folio, Voices From the Attic and The Potter’s Wheel. Her chapbook, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bones, won the Pennsylvania Poetry Society Chapbook Award in 2007. Her children’s book, Jonathan and the Flying Broomstick, was published in August 2010. A resident of O’Hara Township, she belongs to the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshop (Carlow University) and the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.

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A career educator, Christine Pasinski taught secondary English in the West Mifflin Area School District for over 36 years. Following her career in public education, she supervised student teachers for Penn State University. A lifelong devotee of poetry, she took her high school and her university students to the International Poetry Forum, where she served on the Advisory Council for 36 years. Currently, she enjoys membership in the Pittsburgh Poetry Society. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals, and she has read them at various venues in the city. In 2011 she published a book of her poetry, Rustlings of Regret.

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Fred Peterson grew up on rice farms throughout Southeast Arkansas in the 1940's and 1950's, the son of a sharecropper and the seventh of eight children.  His poetry takes one on a journey with a family rich in love.  A teacher early in his career, his life-path took him from Arkansas to St. Louis and to Pittsburgh where he has lived for the last 25 years.  He is a member and past president of the Pittsburgh Poetry Society.  His book of poetry, Writing by Flashlight, was published  by Awesome Books in 2012.

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

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Christine Aikens Wolfe writes poetry and fiction. Christine has published poems in Sonnetto Poesia, a bi-lingual quarterly out of Ottawa since fall 2006. Her poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in the publications of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, including Parachute, the WPWP Bulletin, Riverspeak, and Threads, and in the Pittsburgh Poetry Society's  bi-annual magazine, The Potter's Wheel.  Her poetry has also been published in Woman Becoming and Poetry Magazine, and the multi-media book, Fission and Form.

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Open Mic

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