WANA LIVE! Reading Series

Nichola Moretti is an adjunct instructor of writing in the Robert Morris University journalism concentration and the Community College of Allegheny County North and West English Department. Among other roles, she has worked as a photographer, writer and editor, embracing each assignment as an extension of her creativity. Nichola just received a second Golden Quill nomination for her work with Mt. Lebanon Magazine. Raised in the Ohio Hill Country, she now calls greater Pittsburgh her home.

Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, both published by the University of New Orleans Press. Each Vagabond by Name won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Mid-Atlantic Fiction and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. That story, about a band of itinerant thieves who wreak havoc on a small Pennsylvania town, was based on actual events that occurred when traveling thieves appeared in the area in the early 2000s. Margo received an MFA from Columbia, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Connellsville, Pennsylvania, she now lives in New Jersey with her family.

Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia, the daughter of Indian immigrant parents who moved to Appalachia in the early 70s so her father could work in the chemical industry. She has lived and worked in Boston for the last 17 years as a Civics teacher in a public middle school. Her writing has appeared at The Bitter Southerner, Catapult, and the Kenyon Review Online.

Connie Kinsey is an award-wining writer living in a converted barn on a dirt road at the top of a hill in West Virginia with two dogs, a cat and the occasional squirrel. Her work has been published online and in print. She writes both fiction and nonfiction.

Barbara Edelman’s poetry collections include Dream of the Gone-From City (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2017) and the chapbooks Exposure and A Girl in Water. Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Spillway, Pleiades, Talking Writing and Raleigh Review. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-coordinates the Writers’ Café.

Wesley Scott McMasters is a poet from Northern Appalachia (Patton, PA) who now resides in East Tennessee (Jefferson City) with his dog Poet ("He came with the name--I swear!"), and he teaches American Lit and Creative Writing at Carson-Newman University. His first book of poems, TRYING TO BE A PERSON, was published in 2016 (Words Dance) and the next, IN WHICH MY LOVER TELLS ME ABOUT THE NATURE OF WILD THINGS, is due from Mammoth Books this year.

Larry Smith is a native of the industrial Ohio River Valley having grown up in Mingo Junction, Ohio., the second of four children. His father was a brakeman on the railroad of Weirton Steel where the author worked two summers to help pay for college. A graduate of Mingo High School, Musking­um College, and Kent State University, he taught at Bowling Green State University’s Firelands College from 1970 to 2012. He is the author of eight previous books of poet­ry, two books of memoirs, five books of fiction, two liter­ary biographies of authors Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Patchen. Larry is the founder and director of The Firelands Writ­ing Center and Bottom Dog Press with its Appalachian Writing Series. He is co-founder with his wife, Ann, of Converg­ing Paths Meditation Center in Huron, Ohio. His most recent book is The Pears: Poems, from Bottom Dog Press.

Special Guest Arlan Hess
Owner of City Books
On Pittsburgh’s North Side

Dr. Todd D. Snyder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at Siena College in Albany, New York. He received a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Marshall University (2004, 2006) and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Ohio University (2011). Snyder is the author of The Rhetoric of Appalachian Identity and 12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym: Boxing and Manhood in Appalachia. His scholarly research draws from a variety of fields: rhetoric and composition, community literacy studies, communications studies, cultural studies, and critical theory.

Snyder also teaches a course at Siena College in hip-hop studies and contributed a chapter to The Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Studies. The son of a West Virginia boxing trainer, Snyder’s work is also intimately connected to his life experience, the theme of working class masculinity serving as primary focus of his writing projects.

Maria Romasco Moore is the author of Some Kind of Animal, a novel, and Ghostographs, an interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by vintage photographs. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Lightspeed, DIAGRAM, Hobart, Interfictions, Kaleidotrope, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the anthology Women Destroy Science Fiction.

She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and has an MFA from Southern Illinois University. She teaches writing at Columbus College of Art and Design.