New Book News! We celebrate B. Elizabeth Beck, Dion O’Reilly & Nancy B. Richardson and their new books, published during lock-down. Join us on YouTube for a live reading and conversation Sunday, November 15 at 7:00 PM EST.
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New Book News! We celebrate Jan Beatty, Patricia Clark and Yvonne Zipter and their new books, published during lock-down. Join us on the Lit Youngstown YouTube channel for a live reading and conversation Sunday, December 20 at 3:00 PM EST.
Continue readingOur new reading series is well underway! We’re making the best of the lockdown by hosting readers with new books and engaging them in conversation about writing and book-making.
Your new book published in 2020-2021? We’d love to celebrate with you. Tell us a bit about yourself and your new book *here*.
Many readings are in the queue, all on Sundays, all live on our YouTube channel. Click on the YouTube link and the reading will livestream.
January 10 at 7:00 PM EST
Alice Friman, Tina Kelley & Stephanie Strickland
Join us on Zoom and Facebook Live for a First Wednesday Series reading by Craig Paulenich & James Winter. Wednesday November 4 at 7:00 PM EST. Co-hosted by Cassandra Lawton. Special invitation to students, graduates & faculty of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts. Open mic to follow. Register here to attend on Zoom.
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“In an essay on race and memory, Toni Morrison wrote of ‘the stress of remembering, its inevitability, [but] the chances for liberation that lie within the process.’ Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new novel, The Water Dancer, is an experiment in taking Morrison’s ‘chances for liberation’ literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?” by Annalisa Quinn of NPR.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 6 PM – 7 PM EST on Zoom. Register here for the 2020 book discussions on the second Wednesday.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
–Walt Whitman
Our hardworking planning committee began planning this conference in February. It seemed so far away, and then screeeee!–what a tailspin–but here we are, meeting on Zoom, and it’s really coming together. Just a few more weeks to register.
This year’s theme is In Many Tongues: Constituents of the Barbaric Yawp.
This year’s conference will be centered around writing and publishing, literary inclusion, translating and translation, dialect and dialog, atypical modes of speech, and the generational, political, ecological, and experimental elements that add to the wider literary conversation.
The conference will include creative readings, craft talks, workshops and panel discussions on writing, reading, teaching, performing, editing and publishing creative works. Highly acclaimed visiting faculty will share their experience and insights, and over 50 presenters from Ohio and beyond will speak on a variety of topics.
Food for Thought!
We missed everyone during our usual summer break. Let’s get the convo re-started with Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, Wednesday September 9 from 6:00-7:00. September through December we’ll meet 2nd Wednesdays on Zoom (until it’s safe to return to Cultivate Cafe). This registration link will give you access to the remaining 2020 discussions. In January we’ll switch to 2nd Thursdays, with a new registration link.
New books are a critical element in the literary landscape, and a great personal accomplishment. What a let-down to have a book emerge to a pandemic lock-down instead of a live celebration.
Let’s fix that! Lit Youngstown is hosting an online Sunday readers series for authors of new titles.
The submission portal is here, for those whose books came out anytime in 2020. We look forward to celebrating and promoting these publications and their authors.
Author Meg Wolitzer writes for the New York Times of Unsheltered, “A dual narrative needs to be not only well choreographed, but also, more important, necessary. Kingsolver’s dual narrative works beautifully here.”
You can find copies of the book at the Mahoning and Trumbull County libraries, YSU Maag Library via OhioLink and the YSU Barnes & Noble.
Many of you enjoyed the reading and craft talk by Robert Olmstead
at our 2017 Fall Literary Festival. Join us for a conversation about Olmstead’s Savage Country. “For weeks countless swarms of locusts, brown-black and brick-yellow, darkened the air like ash from a great conflagration, their jaws biting all things for what could be eaten.”