WANA LIVE! Reading Series

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.