WANA LIVE! Reading Series

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 at
bookshop.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.

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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).

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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 being

in 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.