Join us for an evening of conversation on writing and publishing in the Rust Belt with NEOMFA Professor, David Giffels, and alumni, Eliese Goldbach and Chris Smith, who are all working within the industry!

David Giffels is the author of six books of nonfiction, including the upcoming Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he teaches in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts creative writing program.

Eliese Colette Goldbach 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. Her first book, Rust, is forthcoming with Flatiron Books.

A graduate of Butler University and the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, Chris Smith is a Publicity Manager at Flatiron Books in New York City. He began his career as a publicity assistant at Penguin and Viking, and has since promoted books by numerous New York Times bestselling authors, including Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry, former Second Lady Dr. Jill Biden, rock climber Tommy Caldwell, psychologist Adam Grant, climate change activist Paul Hawken, novelist Amor Towles, and original SNL writer Alan Zweibel.

*This event is free & open to the public*