This is the first anthology by Purpled Palm Press! We’re throwing a party to celebrate and take some of the blech out of breakups, or at least we can feel through it all together rather than alone. Sounds nice, right?

We’ll be showcasing the writers featured in the book with readings, and will have a dance party with DJ Candi Fresca

Calling all Poets & Musicians…

Join us for this Fundraising Event!

Showcase your talent and raise money for Commit2Change–an organization dedicated to educating orphan girls in India!

All are welcome! This is a safe, inclusive space!

Please join us in a celebration of World’d Too Much: The Selected Poetry of Russell Atkins, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Now 93, Atkins—the master of modernist poetry and lifelong Clevelander—will be recognized with a performance of his music and words at Karamu House, where he ran a poetry workshop for many years. Readers will include: Ali Black, Leila Chatti, Daniel Gray-Kontar, Siaara Freeman, Janice A. Lowe, Robert E. McDonough, Phil Metres, Julie Patton, Arceny Harton, and Kevin Prufer.

Presented by the CSU Poetry Center, Karamu House, and Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

To learn more about World’d Too Much or to purchase a copy, visit www.csupoetrycenter.com.

RSVP HERE

Heirloom, a world premiere workshop production by local playwright Mike Geither, is a non-fiction theatrical solo performance piece exploring four generations of an extended family. Probing into the family’s social and emotional inheritance of alcoholism, violence, rape, and incest, Heirloom attempts to shed understanding on how any one person may affect the generation of family members that follows.

(Mature Themes: rape, incest)

Run time: 65 Minutes.

Click here for info about showtimes and tickets.

Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival will take place October 4-5 in Youngstown, Ohio, about an hour southeast of Cleveland and northwest of Pittsburgh.

The two-day creative writing conference will include readings, craft talks, workshops and panel discussions on writing, reading and editing poetry, fiction, memoir and essay. Highly acclaimed visiting faculty will share their experience and insights, and presenters from Ohio and beyond, from Michigan to Maine to Maryland, will speak on a variety of topics. This year’s theme is cultural identity in writing and publishing, and we will  engage questions of inclusion, diaspora, dialect and intersectionality.

This year’s book fair will include Cleveland Drafts Literary Festival, Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Kenyon Review, Northeast Ohio of Fine Arts, Ohio Poetry Association,  Sheila-Na-Gig online/Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, Slippery Elm and Stranded Oak Press.

For more info on registration and to see a full schedule: https://lityoungstown.org/fall-literary-festival/

Ross Gay is the author of three books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

Ross is the also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook “Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens,” in addition to being co-author, with Richard Wehrenberg, Jr., of the chapbook, “River.” He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Photo by: Natasha Komoda | www.natashakomoda.com

Cleveland Drafts is an annual literary festival featuring writers from across Northeast Ohio working in fiction, poetry, nonfiction and playwriting at every stage of their careers. This year’s festival will be held in the Larchmere neighborhood.

As writers, we at Cleveland Drafts know that the opportunity to perform new written work is also an occasion to develop writing that has been living in a drawer or to write something entirely new. By highlighting drafts, or works-in-progress that have not yet been published, we encourage the creation and development of literary works from voices in our area who face different challenges to their practice at each new stage of their career.

For more info on the day’s schedule, keep an eye on their website: Clevelanddrafts.com

Amy Long is the author of Codependence, selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She serves as a contributing editor at the drug history blog Points.

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, At Length, Colorado Review, Diode, Indiana Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. His chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Recent translations include Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine(1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles. He authored many novels and collections of poetry, among them Agadir, Soleil Arachnide, Ce Maroc!, and Legende et vie d’Agoun’chich. Scorpionic Sun is the first book-length translation of his work into English.

Paola Capó-García is the author of Clap for Me That’s Not Me, selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’s 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Volta, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. She is the co-founder/editor of the literary/arts journal littletell, alongside Maria Flaccavento. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches twelfth-grade English.

Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Advantages of Being Evergreen, winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Open Book Poetry Competition, and of The Spectral Wilderness, selected by Mark Doty for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbook The Gospel According to X. He is an assistant professor of poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and serves on the editorial team at Fence. His work has been recognized most recently with a New Works Grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Holloway Visiting Professorship in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Matuk is currently working on a collaboration with visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez that is forthcoming from Singing Saw Press.

Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, February 2019), The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. Abdurraqib has two forthcoming books including a new collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) and a history of Black performance in the United States titled They Don’t Dance No Mo’ (Random House, 2020).

Henk Rossouw’s book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize. The African Poetry Book Fund included his chapbook The Water Archives in their boxset New-Generation African Poets: Tano. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is from South Africa.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light (2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017). Her most recent book of essays was nominated for the University of Iowa’s Essay Prize and won the CLMP Firecracker Award for nonfiction. She is the Helen Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Michigan.