For the ninth year, convergence-continuum continues its successful collaboration with the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) in Creative Writing Program. The Festival runs two weekends, Thursday-Saturday at 8 pm, with different plays each weekend.

Week 1 (Feb 13-15) features the full-length play A Shape to This Ache by MFA candidate Morgan Elswick, directed by Jonah Raider-Roth, featuring actors Joan Janknowski, Joseph Milan, Clare Scott, and Kim Woodworth.

Week 2 (Feb 20-22) features the one-act play The Purple Queen by Ralph Myers, directed by Tyson Douglas Rand, and two ten-minute plays: First to Die Wins by Justin Lazor, directed by Eva Nel Brettrager and Autopoiesis by Oana Leuce, directed by David Munnell.
The Week 2 plays feature the following cast members in various roles: J.C. Cifranic, Samantha Cocco, Jamal Davidson, Mike Frye, Robert Lucchesi, Casey McCann, Grace Mitri, J.P. Peralta, Hannah Storch, Tim Tavcar and Monica Zach.

The 2020 NEOMFA Playwrights Festival opens Thursday, Feb. 13 and runs at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through Feb. 22 at the Liminis Theater, 2438 Scranton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113 in the historic Tremont neighborhood.

Tickets are $10 general admission and $5 for students. Tickets and information are available at convergence-continuum.org or 216-687-0074.

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).

Join Literary Cleveland for a half-day conference on fiction writing and publishing in partnership with the Writers House at Case Western Reserve University. The February Fiction Conference takes place Saturday, February 29 from 12-5pm at Clark Hall – Case Western Reserve University (11130 Bellflower Rd, Cleveland OH 44106).

This conference is designed to help fiction writers of all genres improve their writing and advance their careers. The day begins with a panel discussion on the craft of fiction, tips for improving your writing habit, and strategies for getting your work published. Participants will be able to choose between two workshops during each session. Session 1 topics include “Building a Setting that Comes Alive” and “Voyage & Return: A Storytelling Map.” Session 2 topics include “Plan. Plot. Publish a Page Turner.” and “Mining the Subconscious.” The day ends with a reception and book-signing.

We’re thrilled to continue a series of standout winter readings in 2020 with Eliese Goldbach and Kisha Nicole Foster on March 3rd. Eliese is joining us for publication day (!) of her debut book, Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit. And Kisha is on the heels of her 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. In short, it couldn’t be a more exciting or more local night. More about our writers below. And, in case you were wondering, we’re offering this as the best possible alternative to refreshing the google page for Super Tuesday results no less than 200 times. There will be plenty of time to check primary results after the reading. We promise.

Eliese Goldbach was a steelworker at Arcelor Mittal Cleveland. She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017. She received the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award and a Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant from the Ohioana Library Association, which is given to a young Ohio writer of promise. She now works as a John Carroll University and lives in Cleveland, OH, with her husband.

Kisha Nicole Foster is a mother, poet, and an arts administrator. Foster is the recipient of the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. She is the author of Poems: 1999-2014 and Bloodwork. Foster is also in her fourth year as Regional Coordinator for Poetry Out Loud, a program of The Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, sponsored through The Ohio Arts Council. She is a two time Pink Door Fellow, and currently the Literary Cleveland Fellow/ Cleveland Stories program coordinator. Foster was commissioned to craft a poem for the Tamir Rice Foundation and their event “Arts, Activism, and Legacy” at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Soul of Philanthropy Cleveland Closing Celebration at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse. Foster, a senior at Cleveland State University, uses her locution as a conduit towards healing and fostering truth within language. She is a fan of a good documentary.

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.

S2EP02 | featuring words from/

Emily Pettit — EMILY PETTIT is a poet, artist, editor and teacher, and the author of Goat in the Snow & Blue Flame. She has taught and lectured at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, the University of Massachusetts, Elms College, and Smith College. Emily is an editor for Factory Hollow Press and jubilat.

Alyssa Perry — ALYSSA PERRY lives in Cleveland and Iowa City. She teaches writing at Cleveland State University and the Cleveland Institute of Art, and serves as assistant editor with Rescue Press. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Poetry Northwest, West Branch Wired, and other journals.

Raja Freeman — RAJA FREEMAN is a performance poet, visual artist, and flautist. She has worked with Twelve Literary Arts as an intern, a member of the Six of Twelve Youth Performance Poetry Ensemble, and a two year member of the One Mic Open Youth Poetry Slam Team. She is currently a student at Cleveland State University and she hates writing bios.

Caryl Pagel — CARYL PAGEL is the author of the forthcoming book of prose Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2, fall 2020) as well as two collections of poetry, Twice Told (University of Akron reprint, 2019), and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow, 2012). Pagel is a co-founder and editor of Rescue Press and the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She is an assistant professor at Cleveland State University, where she teaches poetry and nonfiction in the NEOMFA program.

BRNHSjournal.co

Cleveland Loves U! is a half-day house festival in honor of National Poetry Month

open mics! workshops! the workbench! readings!

join BARNHOUSE in celebrating National Poetry Month the only way we know how.

drink, eat, be merry, celebrate writing.

schedule:

6-7 | Writing Workshops
fiction, nonfiction, & poetry workshops by JDavid, Matt Mitchell, Alex DiFrancesco, & more

7-8 | the WORKBENCH ft JDavid (open mic to follow)
the WORKBENCH is a poetry-in-concert series. think NPR’s Tiny Desk, but for poetry.

8-9 | Cleveland Loves U! reading

emcee: Kevin Latimer

readers:

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and TriQuarterly. Her work has been selected for Best New Poets, the Williams Carlos Williams University Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and New South’s Poetry Prize. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine(www.constructionlitmag.com) and writes a blog about motherhood (https://otherwomendonttellyou.wordpress.com/).

Courtney Ebert is in her second year of the NEOMFA program at Cleveland State. She was a finalist for the Gordon Square Review fiction contest in 2018, and she is trying her hardest, ok?

Amber Taliancich is the Co-founder and Essay Editor for Sidereal Magazine. She also teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University, as well as is the Program Coordinator for the NEOMFA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, Gigantic Sequins, Hobart, The Pinch, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives in Lakewood, OH.

Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Central Massachusetts who left
his perfectly good marketing job to study poetry in Cleveland, Ohio. He works at the CSU Poetry Center and is a student in the NEOMFA.

cost: FREE! (donations accepted at the door)
location: 1484 E. 105th Street, Cleveland, OH 44106

BRNHSjournal.co

Please join us for a reading and reception celebrating the release of Leila Chatti’s first full-length collection of poetry, DELUGE.

In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as “flooding.” DELUGE mines Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both.

Leila Chatti is the inaugural Annisfield-Wolf Fellow in Editing & Writing, and is the author of the chapbooks Eb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize.