WANA LIVE! Reading Series

Megan Schreiber-Carter is a third-generation native of Elk County, PA, and a career writer. She’s spent much of her career in Washington, D.C.. Her clients include—a national, news-wire service; Discovery Neworks; and, National Geographic. Megan has taught for—American University, George Washington University, the University of the District of Columbia, and The International Center for Language Studies. She also taught the little people as a Calvert Home-School teacher, when her child was in grade school. Now that her child is grown, Megan spends much of her time in the Elk County home her family has owned for 90 of the 100 years it has stood among the remains of a turn-of-the-1900s Boomtown. For WCoNA, she will read from her new short story, about the tall tales and telling truths told in rural Elk County from the late 1870s to the late 1970s. The story, called “The Great Aunt Alice Collection,” is available—electronically, in print, and as a recording—from major booksellers. Megan joins us, for our WCoNA LIVE! Reading Series, from that same, old, Elk County house, in which the story is set. For more information about The Great Aunt Alice Collection, as well as Megan’s other work, please visit https://www.megansdesk.net/​​.

Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a PhD in English from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington; she is Professor of English at Ohio University Southern in southeastern Ohio. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online (https://sheilanagigblog.com/​) and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Philip Terman is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently, Our Portion: New and Selected Poems. A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka was translated into Arabic and published in Damascus, Syria. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Sun Magazine, and been included in a mural by James Simon, “The Singing Musicians” at the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry. He’s a professor of English at Clarion University, and the coordinator of The Bridge Literary and Arts Center in Franklin, Pennsylvania. More information can be found at www.philipterman.com.

Donna Dzurilla graduated with a BA in Professional Writing (minors in art, philosophy, and English Literature) and received the Excellence in Professional Writing Award from Carlow University. Her sculpture has appeared at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, BoxHeart and Panza galleries, Pittsburgh Technology Council shows, and featured in Urbanic 2: Catalyzing a Regional Economic Renaissance at the Pittsburgh International Airport. She was commissioned to create a public art piece for the 2010 Three Rivers Arts Festival by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Donna’s monologues are a mainstay in Carlow University Theater’s Practice Monologamy series and have been performed at Yinz Like Plays?!10 Minute Play Festival. A staged reading of her play, SCRAP, was performed in 2017 at the Henry Heymann Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh.

Her creative nonfiction pieces have appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Currently working towards her MFA in Carlow University’s Creative Writing Program with a concentration in fiction, Donna’s short stories have been published in the Voices from the Attic anthology series, Rune, The Penny, and other publications. She is working on a novel set during the demise of the steel industry.

Amanda E. Hayes is an assistant professor of English at Kent State University–Tuscarawas. She is the author of the 2019 College English Association of Ohio's Nancy Dasher Award winning book, The Politics of Appalachian Rhetoric.
In exploring the ways that Appalachian people speak and write, Hayes raises the importance of knowing and respecting communication styles within a marginalized culture. Diving deep into the region’s historical roots—especially those of the Scotch-Irish and their influence on her own Appalachian Ohio—Hayes reveals a rhetoric with its own unique logic, utility, and poetry. Throughout, Hayes blends conventional scholarship with autobiography, storytelling, and dialect, illustrating Appalachian rhetoric’s validity as a means of creating and sharing knowledge.

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Tricks of Light , Border Crossings, Guess and Check , Violent Outbursts, Haywire, Tetched, and Roughhouse. Guess and Check won a Bronze Award for multicultural fiction from Electronic Literature. Haywire won the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Bonnie Proudfoot moved to Athens, OH, from Fairmont, WV. She has Creative Writing MA from Hollins and one from WVU. She received a Fellowship for the Arts from the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, and has published poetry and fiction in many journals, including the Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Quarter After Eight, the Lyric, and Sheila-Na-Gig. Her first novel, Goshen Road, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020. Buy Bonnie's novel, Goshen Road, here: https://amzn.to/3cgqPcI​

Born and raised in Pennsylvania’s coal country Damian Dressick is the author of the novel 40 Patchtown (Bottom Dog Press). His creative work has appeared in more than fifty literary journals and anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s New Micro, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Cutbank, failbetter.com, Hippocampus, Smokelong Quarterly, HeartWood, and New World Writing.

A Blue Mountain Residency Fellow, Dressick is the winner of the Harriette Arnow Award and the Jesse Stuart Prize. His story collection Fables of Deconstruction is forthcoming from CLASH Books in early 2021. He co-hosts WCONA: LIVE!, a virtual reading series that brings some of the best Appalachian writers to the world. Dressick teaches writing at Clarion University of Pennsylvania.

To learn more about Damian and to order his work, visit his website: DamianDressick.com

Dr. Christina Fisanick is an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania where she teaches expository writing, creative non-fiction, and digital storytelling. Christina is the author of dozens of articles and essays in addition to over thirty books, including her most recent memoir, The Optimistic Food Addict. She lives in Wheeling, West Virginia with her cats and kid.