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.