WANA LIVE! Reading Series

Amy Clark was born in the heart of the Appalachian mountains of Virginia and teaches at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. She is the 2012 recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing. Her book, TALKING APPALACHIAN details the history and features of Appalachian dialects, as well as pieces by well-known authors about what it means to speak them. She is founder and Director of the Appalachian Writing Project, a non-profit organization for teachers whose mission is to improve the teaching of writing in rural schools. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers.More info at http://www.amydclark.com

Cat Pleska, author, educator, publisher, and oral historian, holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. Her memoir, Riding on Comets was published by West Virginia University Press, 2015. Cat edited three anthologies and her essays have appeared in Still: The Journal, Heartwood Magazine, Change 7 Magazine, and many others.

In honor of baseball season, WANA is featuring a double header tonight! Cody McDevitt is an investigative reporter based in Pittsburgh. He's written several books, including his most recent, Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania, which details one of the worst racial injustices in western Pennsylvania history. More than 2,000 Black and Latino people were forced from their homes after a racially charged police shooting. He is currently working on his next book about the history of the abortion rights movement. Dan Reidmiller is a short-story writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A recent graduate of Chatham University's MFA program, Dan is currently at work on his debut manuscript, tentatively titled, RIVER RATS: AND OTHER SIMERAL'S FERRY TALES. The project is a short-story cycle that intertwines the lives of a range of characters in a small, lower-class Appalachian town called Simeral's Ferry. During the day, Dan works full-time as a Content Writer and Strategist for an international software company, and in his spare time, he volunteers as a member of WANA, where he serves on the advisory board.

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as several chapbooks of poetry, including A Thirst That's Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire and teaches writing at Plymouth State University.

Patricia Thrushart has published three books of poetry, Little Girl Against The Wall, Yin and Yang, and Sanctity: Poems from Northern Appalachia. Her work appears regularly in The Watershed Journal, a regional literary magazine of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and on the website North/South Appalachia. Her poems have been published in Tiny Seed, Clarion University's Tobeco, The Avocet, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Feminine Collective, Curating Alexandria, High Shelf Press, and The Northern Appalachia Review. Several of her poems have won awards from both the Pennsylvania Poetry Society and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her first narrative nonfiction book, Cursed: The Life and Tragic Death of Marion Alsobrook Stahlman, will be published in October 2021, by Adelaide Books of New York.

A native of Loretto, Pennsylvania now living in Pittsburgh, Ron Donoughe is best known for his spirited realistic landscape paintings of Western Pennsylvania. He has a B.A. in Art Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and has studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California.Like many painters he has held a variety of odd jobs – landscaper, gravedigger, chicken catcher, art teacher, museum installer, graphic designer, and college instructor.He works full time now as a professional artist/painter. His work can be found in many corporate and private collections as well as the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art and The University Museum at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.Ron's interest in plein art painting led to the formation of The Plein-Air Painters of Western Pennsylvania. The group meets informally to paint Pittsburgh from April through November. In addition, his work has appeared in 12 films which were shot in the Pittsburgh region.

Savannah Sipple is the author of WWJD & Other Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), which was included on the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow Recommended LGBTQ Reading List. It explores what it is to be a queer woman in Appalachia and is rooted in its culture and in her body. A writer from east Kentucky, her writing has been published in Go Magazine, Southern Cultures, Split This Rock, Salon, and other places. She is also the recipient of grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. A professor, editor, and writing mentor, Savannah resides in Lexington with her wife.

Join us at Watershed Books on Main Street in Brookville, PA for WANA LIVE!'s very first in-person reading and book signing with David Drayer. Book signing begins at 6:30 PM, which will be followed by a reading at 7:00 PM. David Drayer is the author of the novels Strip Cuts, A Noble Story, Something Fierce, the novella, Attachment, and the autobiographical collection, Wayward Son: Travels and Reflections. Born in the small town of Rimersburg, Pennsylvania, Drayer has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and many cities in between. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and has worked countless jobs, including stints as an adjunct English professor, ghostwriter, actor, corporate trainer, and instructional designer. His novella, Attachment, is currently in development with Winterlight Pictures and Voyage Media and in Los Angeles. David has a penchant for open-ended motorcycles trips, long hikes, and good food. More biographical information can be found at DavidDrayer.com

Judi Tarowsky was a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 25 years and wrote other people's stories. Now, as a storyteller, she gets to tell her own.She discovered storytelling in 2006, and after winning first place in the inaugural Strand Theater Preservation Society Storytelling Festival Liar's Contest in Moundsville, WV, began her study of the craft in earnest. She went on to earn a Graduate Certificate in Storytelling from the University of North Texas Library Sciences program.Since then, Judi has performed at festivals, libraries, museums, and special events in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Maryland, and Wales. She also has produced and co-produced storytelling festivals at Prickett's Fort in Fairmont, WV, and at Grand Vue Park in Moundsville, WV. She has been a regular storyteller during the summer at Wilson Lodge in Oglebay Resort, Wheeling, WV. Her original story, “The Heroes of the U.S.S. Shenandoah” was the keynote for the 90th commemoration ceremony for the crash of the U.S.S. Shenandoah airship in Belle Valley, OH.She is a member of the West Virginia Storytelling Guild and a past president.

Ed Simon is an Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing editor for the History News Network, and a staff writer at The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site.” He is the author of several books, most recently Furnace of this World; or, 36 Observations about Goodness.His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Poetry, McSweeney's, Aeon, Jacobin, Salon, The New Republic and The New York Times among dozens of others.Currently he is finishing Pandemonium, a work of illustrated nonfiction combining popular history, cultural criticism, and art history, which was recently acquired by Abrams Book and is scheduled for publication in 2021.Originally a native of Pittsburgh, he has lived in New York City, Boston, and now Washington DC. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University.

Ed McClanahan, a native of northeastern Kentucky, is the author of The Natural Man, Famous People I Have Known, and five other books, most recently Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever (Counterpoint, 2020). He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Yaddo Fellowships, and an Al Smith Fellowship. He and his wife Hilda live in Lexington, Kentucky.

Tiffany Williams is a native of Eastern Kentucky. She is a coal miner's daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter and an exciting emerging voice who crafts achingly beautiful songs about what it means, in her experience, to be from the Appalachian Mountains.Her debut EP, When You Go, released January 18, 2019, features five tracks, all of which were penned by the artist and are a meditation on life in the mountains—a place, as echoed in the title track, that "you can't leave […] when you go."In addition to her keen abilities as a songwriter, Tiffany is an award-winning fiction writer (publishing as T.M. Williams). She is the recipient of the 2011 Jean Ritchie Fellowship for Appalachian Writing and the 2017 Denny C. Plattner Award for fiction. Her stories have been featured in Still: The Journal, Waxing & Waning, and Appalachian Heritage. While she is still writing songs, she is also currently at work on her first novel.

Join us as we celebrate WANA LIVE!'s first birthday! Our writer this week is the incomparable Jennifer Haigh AND we will be announcing an exciting new WANA LIVE! initiative as a thank you for being here with us this past year. JENNIFER HAIGH is a novelist and short story writer. Her novel HEAT AND LIGHT won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Her previous books include FAITH, THE CONDITION, BAKER TOWERS and MRS. KIMBLE, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and the short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Granta, The Atlantic, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. Jennifer Haigh has been awarded grants by the James Michener Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Boston. https://www.jennifer-haigh.com/

lison Stine grew up in rural Ohio. Her first novel Road Out of Winter is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her other books include three collections of poetry. Recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Geographic, she has published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her next novel Trashlands will be published by MIRA/HarperCollins in October.* * * * * * * * * *http://www.alisonstine.com

Sandee Gertz is a native of Western Pennsylvania and the author of The Pattern Maker's Daughter (Poems, Bottom Dog Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Green Mountains Review, and more. The Write Launch has recently featured her memoir writing. She is a Sandburg-Livesay Award winner and was featured as one of 16 Working Class Poets in World Literature Today. She teaches at Cumberland University outside of Nashville and has a M.F.A. from Wilkes University.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015).

Omope Carter Daboiku grew up in Ironton along the Ohio River in Lawrence County, Ohio, defined as northcentral Appalachia; and, cherished annual family trips “back home” to extended families living in both the Blue Ridge of Virginia and the Smokies along the TN/GA borderlands. Trained as a cultural geographer, her writing explores the dynamics of her mixed ancestry family, migration, and the internal angst of being a “hillbilly” in brown skin.A professional storyteller since 1990, Omope's original works can be found in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers (Shepherd University) and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel (Southern Appalachian Writers Collective). Achieving childhood dreams, Omope has travelled internationally, even representing Appalachia on a US State Department tour of Turkey in 2008. Her first published short story, “The Power of Water Baptism” (AAW, FRX Edition VI) was nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

Tommy Dean is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. The Editor at Fractured Lit, Dean's work has appeared in the BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His stories have been included in the Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He is the winner of the Lascaux Review Short Story Prize 2019. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter.

John Lawson has taught writing and rhetoric at Robert Morris University for twenty-two years. His poetry collection, Generations, was published by the St. Andrews University Press, and his poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Vox Populi, and many other print and online venues. He also writes plays and stories

Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and Wigleaf, as well as Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.

Jason Irwin is the author of The History of Our Vagrancies (forthcoming, Main Street Rag), A Blister of Stars (Low Ghost, 2016), & Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008). He earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife writer Jen Ashburn, and currently is working on a memoir. www.jasonirwin.blogspot.com

Jamilla Rice dreams of when she can own her days and write. Until then, she squeezes out moments during her time as an athlete, educator, speaker, aunt, gardener, book nerd, baker, and British detective drama junkie. Her work has been published in previous volumes of Voices from the Attic and Pittsburgh Poetry Review, among other anthologies and periodicals. You may have heard her read at Hemmingways, White Whale Books, Delanie's Coffee House, on WESA's Prosody, or that one open mic in Toronto.Her work includes poetry, short fiction, flash nonfiction and combinations of all of the above and more. Topics generally explore: the intersection of the personal and political; past as present and future; the beauty within the mundane and pain; the science, math and absurdity of human behavior; and the undying insistence of oppressed peoples to do more than simply exist. (Hence, all of the above).

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Kif, which is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2022, and Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950's Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

James Charlesworth's first novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, was published in 2019. His writing has appeared in Natural Bridge and was awarded finalist status in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. He was also the recipient of a Martin Dibner Fellowship. James grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh, attended Penn State University, and received an MFA from Emerson College in Boston, where he currently lives.

Leslie Anne Mcilroy won the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize for Gravel, the 2001 Word Press Poetry Prize for her first full-length collection Rare Space, the 1997 Chicago Literary Awards and the 2018 Gemini Flash Fiction contest. The publication of her nonfiction first, The Red Door: A Historical Memoire of The Squirrel Hill Cafe is forthcoming in fall, 2020.

Amy Jo Burns is the author of the memoir Cinderland and Shiner, a novel which is out now from Riverhead Books. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the anthology Not That Bad.

SHEILA SQUILLANTE is the author of the poetry collection, Beautiful Nerve, and three chapbooks of poetry: In This Dream of My Father, Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry and A Woman Traces the Shoreline. Her second collection, Mostly Human, has won the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books and will be published in October, 2020. She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page (Sense Publishers, 2015).Recent work has appeared or will appear in places like Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Indiana Review, Waxwing, and River Teeth. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University, where she edits The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing. From her dining room table, she edits Barrelhouse online.

Michael Dittman lives and writes near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania surrounded by the palimpsest of the Appalachian Rust Belt and its ghosts. He's worked at bike shops, in newsrooms, and on top of roofs, but today he can be found more often at the front of a classroom. He is the author of Jack Kerouac; A Biography, Masterpieces of the Beat Generation, and Small Brutal Incidents. His short stories and poetry, as well as his journalism and non-fiction, are widely published. Contact him at www.Michaeldittman.com

Laura Jackson Roberts is an environmental writer and humorist from northern West Virginia. She holds degrees in environmental science and creative writing. A graduate of Chatham University, her work has appeared in many publications, including Hippocampus, Terrain.org, Brevity, Defenestration, Brain-Child, Bayou Magazine, The Museum of Americana, Animal, and the Erma Bombeck humor site. She's served as an editor for Literary Mama Magazine and is a VP of West Virginia Writers, the state's largest writing and literary organization. Laura lives and does freelance work in Wheeling, where she writes for Weelunk and is finishing a book of humorous essays on life in West Virginia.

Joseph Bathanti, son of a union steelworker and union seamstress, respectively, grew up in Pittsburgh. He is the former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award in Literature. He is the author of ten books of poetry, four books of fiction, and two books of nonfiction. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education & Writer-in-Residence of Appalachian State University's Watauga Residential College in Boone, NC.

Brittany Hailer is a freelance reporter and educator based in Pittsburgh. For her stories of people affected by the opioid epidemic, she received a 2019 Golden Quill Award from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania and a Robert L. Vann Award of Excellence for investigative/enterprise reporting from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation. Her memoir and poetry collection "Animal You'll Surely Become" was published by Tolsun Books in 2018. Brittany has taught creative writing classes at the Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House as part of Chatham's Words Without Walls program and now teaches creative writing and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work as appeared in NPR, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

Jeremy is the author of Bearwallow: A Personal History of a Mountain Homeland (Blair, 2014), which won the 2014 Appalachian Book of the Year in nonfiction and was awarded gold in the 2015 Independent Publisher Book (IPPY) Awards in memoir. His essays have been named Notable in Best American Essays and published in Oxford American, The Iowa Review, and Brevity, among others. Jeremy earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University, in his native North Carolina. He also serves as the series co-editor for In Place: a literary nonfiction book series from Vandalia Press, the creative imprint of WVU Press.

John Hoppenthaler's books of poetry are Domestic Garden (2015), Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), and Lives of Water (2003), all with Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poetry and essays have appeared in many journals, anthologies, and textbooks, including New York Magazine, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Southern Review, Christian Science Monitor, Southeast Review, The Laurel Review, The Florida Review, West Branch, The Literary Review, Blackbird, New York Magazine, Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State U of New York P, 2010), September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (Etruscan Press, 2002), Blooming through the Ashes: An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit (Rutgers UP, 2008), Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Editions, 2005), Poetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing, 2006-2012), Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina (U of North Carolina P, 2013), A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U of Akron P, 2012), The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2013), The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina (Texas Review Press, 2014), Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (West Virginia UP, 2017), and A Compendium of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019).With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P, 2012). His essays, interviews, and essay/reviews appear in such journals as Arts & Letters, Southeast Review, Chelsea, Bellingham Review, Pleiades, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Waccamaw, North Carolina Literary Review, and Kestrel, where he served as Poetry editor for eleven years. He currently serves as Advisory Editor to the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, where he edits “A Poetry Congeries.” He also serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices.Among his honors are the ECU 5-Year Achievement for Research & Creative Activity Award, the ECU Department of English Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity, an Individual Artist Grant from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, grants from the New York Foundation on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts, and the North Carolina Community Council for the Arts, and Residency Fellowships from The Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Elizabeth Bishop House, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He was named and served two terms as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Eastern Region of North Carolina, and Domestic Garden received the Brockman—Campbell Award for the best collection of poetry by a North Carolinian in 2015.

Deesha Philyaw's debut short story collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES, focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church and is a finalist for the National Book Award. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN's The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.

Clarion University professors, Dr. Marc Sanko and Dr. Jeffrey Diamond, recently launched the podcast “Stories from the Pennsylvania Wilds,” where they showcase these important pieces of history from across the Wilds region. Join us as they talk about the genesis of their show and what's coming up next.

Taylor Grieshober is the author of the short story collection Off Days, published by Low Ghost Press in 2019. Her most recent story was awarded third place in the Masters Review Winter Short Story Contest, judged by Kimberly King Parsons. Her other work has appeared in Hobart and Gulf Stream, among others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Oregon State University. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she is a high school fiction teacher. Bart Solarczyk lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his daughter, dog and cat. His poems have recently appeared in Big Hammer, Live Nude Poems, Rasputin, Winedrunk Sidewalk and River Dog. He appears in G.A.S. #3, a Gypsy Art Show video that can be viewed on YouTube, reading five of his poems. His book Tilted World is available from Low Ghost Press and on Amazon.

Michael Knost is a Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor and author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers. He has written in various genres and helmed multiple anthologies. His Writers Workshop of Horror won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award® in England for superior achievement in non-fiction. His critically acclaimed Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an Amazon #1 bestseller. Return of the Mothman, Barbers and Beauties, and Author's Guide to Marketing with Teeth were all finalists for the Bram Stoker Award®. Michael is the host of a new podcast called The Author's Voice. He received the Horror Writers Association's Silver Hammer Award in 2015 for his work as the organization's mentorship chair. He also received the prestigious J.U.G. (Just Uncommonly Good) Award from West Virginia Writer's Inc. His Return of the Mothman is currently being filmed as a film adaption. He has taught writing classes and workshops at several colleges, conventions, online, and currently resides in Chapmanville, West Virginia with his wife, daughter, and a zombie goldfish.

KRISTOFER COLLINS is the publisher at Low Ghost Press and the books editor at Pittsburgh Magazine. He is the co-host of the Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series. Over the years, he created a literary name for himself with projects such as The New Yinzer and The Bridge Series. HIs latest book is THE RIVER IS ANOTHER KIND OF PRAYER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS. Collins lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife Dr. Anna Johnson and their son Cassidy.

Chauna Craig is professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she has also served as Director of Women Studies and Dean's Associate of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, Superstition Review, Smokelong Quarterly and elsewhere. Her work has been designated a finalist in Terrain.org's Environmental Writing contest, a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and an honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize series. She has received fellowships to Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her short story collection, The Widow's Guide to Edible Mushrooms, was published in 2016.

Marc Harshman is the new poet laureate of West Virginia. A full-length collection of poems, GREEN-SILVER AND SILENT, has just been published by Bottom Dog Press. Four chapbooks of poems include ROSE OF SHARON, Mad River Press, MA. Periodical publications include Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, The Progressive, Appalachian Heritage, and Fourteen Hills. Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona. Short prose works have recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His eleven children's books include THE STORM, a Smithsonian Notable Book. His children's books have also been published in Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Danish, and Swedish. He has three new children's titles forthcoming. He lives in Wheeling, West Virginia and holds degrees from Bethany College, Yale University Divinity School, and the University of Pittsburgh.

Kim Chinquee is the author of seven collections, most recently Snowdog, due out in January 2021 with Ravenna Press. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and has published in several joumals and anthologies including Noon, Denver Quarterly, Fiction, Story, StoryQuarterly, New Miro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, Buffalo Noir, Conjunctions, The Best Small Fiction 2019 and others. She is Senior Editor for New World Writing, and an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo State.

Byron Hoot was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia and lived there until he went to college - a twelve year excursion. He never returned to West Virginia but he never left it. Appalachia, the hills and streams, the people, his memories of those first eighteen years are deeply embedded. Now he lives in northwestern Pennsylvania... still in Appalachia. He has recently had poems in The Watershed Journal, Tobeco Literary Arts Journal, and The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and in Pennessence. He is a co-founder of The Tamarack Writers (1974) and The Fernwood Writers Retreat (2019).You can find Hoot's books and books by other WCONA LIVE! writers atbookshop.org/lists/wcona-live-northern-appalachia-s-literary-homeplace

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Karen J. Weyant is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Main Street Rag). Her poems and essays have appeared in Chautauqua, Copper Nickel, Crab Creek Review, Crab Orchard Review, cream city review, Fourth River, Lake Effect, Rattle, River Styx and Whiskey Island. Her poems have also appeared in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry Series and the Sundress Publications Best of the Net annual anthology. She lives in Warren, Pennsylvania and is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.

Christina Veladota's poetry has appeared in many literary journals, including Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Laurel Review, The Journal, Bellingham Review, Dialogist, Hotel Amerika, and Mid American Review. The author of two chapbooks, Clutch & Brood (Aldrich Press, 2016) and The Girl & Her Lions (Finishing Line Press, 2010), she currently serves as an associate professor of English Composition & Literature at Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio, where she is also the coordinator of The WSCC Honors Program. She was a finalist for a 2020 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and is a recipient of a 2020 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.Please stick around after Christina's reading for a special announcement.

Sarah Shotland is the author of the novel Junkette, and her essays have been published in The lowa Review, Baltimore Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She is Program Director of Words Without Walls, which brings creative writing to jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers in Pittsburgh & teaches in the MFA program at Chatham Universit

Kari Gunter-Seymour is a ninth generation Appalachian and editor the Women of Appalachia Project anthologies, "Women Speak," volumes 1-6 and "Essentially Athens Ohio," an anthology focused on landmarks, tales and experiences of those living in or deeply connected to Athens county. She holds a B.F.A. in graphic design and an M.A. in commercial photography and is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. A poem she wrote in support of families living in poverty in Athens County, OH, went viral and has been seen by over 100,000 people, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to her local food pantry. She is the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her work was selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to be included in the PBS American Portrait crowdsourced poem, Remix: For My People. Her poetry appears in several publications including, The NY Times, Verse Daily, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Main Street Rag, Stirring, Still, CALYX and The LA Times. Her chapbook “Serving” is available from Crisis Chronicles Press. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She teaches a monthly workshop series and has worked with incarcerated men, women, teens, and women in recovery housing.​Her award winning photography has been published nationally in The Sun Magazine, Light Journal, Looking at Appalachia, Storm Cellar Quarterly, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Vine Leaves Journal and Appalachian Review. Gunter-Seymour is the founder/executive director of the “Women of Appalachia Project,” an arts organization she created to address discrimination directed at women from the Appalachian region by encouraging participation from women artists (spoken word and fine art ) of diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together, embrace the stereotype, show the whole woman; beyond the superficial factors people use to judge her. (www.womenofappalachia.com).​

Join us on New Year's Eve as we celebrate the work of emerging writers from four graduate programs throughout northern Appalachia.Nathaniel Ricketts is a poet from Pittsburgh and a 5th-year student in the Penn State English department's BA/MA program in creative writing. He is currently working on his master's thesis, a chap-book length collection of poems focused on class struggle and environmental politics in the Rust Belt.Matthew Dougherty grew up in Ohio and is a third-year fiction student in the MFA program at West Virginia University. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Sonora Review, and Crab Orchard Review, all as contest winners. He also enjoys writing and performing original songs under the artist name Matt Skerk.Arista Rawat Engineer is a poet and fiction writer whose work explores questions that arise from the confluence of worlds-modernity and tradition, language and culture, myth and literature. She is a first-year student at Chatham University's MFA program. She is from Pune, India and loves beingin Pittsburgh because she's always lived in places that begin with a "P"!Doralee Brooks lives in Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from Carlow University. Her poems have appeared in Voices from the Attic, Paterson Literary Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Dos Passos Review among others. Doralee's chapbook, When I Hold You Up to the Light, won the 2019 Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Contest published by Main Street Rag.As always, you can find books by WCONA writers on BookShop.com/shop/WCONA LIVE

P.K. Harmon is the Founding Editor of Al in Aelon Kein: the Marshall Islands Literary Review and former theatre director and Humanities professor of the College of the Marshall Islands. A graduate of Ohio University's Program in Creative Writing, he was recently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing for the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. He is currently a writing professor at the University of Guam. He has had individual poems published recently in Riverwind, The Marshall Islands Journal, and the Laurel Review.

Matthew Ferrence wandered away from his birthplace in southwestern Pennsylvania to live in the high desert of southern Arizona, then in the urban cultural center of Paris, France. Pulled by shared geographies of their home Appalachians, he and his wife returned to the Laurel Highlands, settled there, became unsettled, then settled again in Northwestern Pennsylvania at the confluence of Appalachia and the Rust Belt. His essays have appeared in literary magazines across North America, with recent work appearing in The Fiddlehead, Gettysburg Review, and Best American Travel Writing 2018. He is the author of two books, the latest – Appalachia North: a memoir – an inquiry into exiles of self and region, precipitated by the curious cultural position of being from Northern Appalachia and by the difficult personal reckoning that comes in the aftermath of the diagnosis and treatment of a brain tumor. He teaches writing and literature at Allegheny College, serves as a visiting faculty member in the West Virginia Wesleyan Low Residency MFA program, and with his family divides time between between northwestern Pennsylvania and Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Nancy Krygowski is the author of The Woman in the Corner (University of Pittsburgh Press) which was named one of the top 100 (or so) books of poetry for 2020 by Library Journal. Her first book, Velocity, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Nancy teaches English to refugees and immigrants in addition to leading poetry workshops at Carlow University's Madwomen in the Attic writing program.

Ligonier Valley Writers has just announced that students from schools throughout western Pennsylvania have won awards in LVW's 29th annual Student Poetry Awards. Two of those writers--Sonya Verbina and AnnMarie Stephenson--will be featured on WCONA LIVE! with special guest hosts, Ondine Dressick and Tristan Greer. Sonya Verbina, a fourth-grader at the Valley School of Ligonier, won the Walter McGough Memorial Award, sponsored by the family of Walter McGough and Ligonier Valley Writers, for “The Aztec Animal.” Category B, Chestnut Ridge Literary Poetry Award. Sponsored by Lou and Barbara Steiner. Sonya's Bio: Hi, my name is Sonya. I'm almost 10 years old, and I really love axolotls. Axolotls are small, endangered animals that come in many colors. Anyways, my name is Sonya and I can speak a couple of different languages. I can speak: Russian, English, a bit of Spanish, and a bit of Chinese. I love to read, and I'm interested in greek mythology.AnnaMarie Stephenson, a sixth-grader at Ligonier Valley Middle School, won 1st prize for “You're Not Here” in Category B. Chestnut Ridge Literary Poetry Award (G 4-6: unrhymed verse, any subject). Sponsored by Lou and Barbara Steiner. AnnaMarie's bio: My name is AnnaMarie. I have always liked writing and science, but I never thought I would win 1st place in an unrhymed poem competition! My father died when I was very young. It was heartbreaking for me. I decided that I would take that and make a poem that makes me remember him. I really miss him.