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.