WANA LIVE! Reading Series

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.

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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.