Lit Youngstown's 8th annual Fall Literary Festival features Youngstown native poet Ama Codjoe & Chicago fiction writer Rachel Swearingen October 19, 2024 at 7pm at The Tyler History Center. This event is free and open to the public. ASL interpretation by Meagan Albani.
Dinner is available before the reading at 5:30pm, catered by B&O Station, with vegan and vegetarian options available. Dinner tickets are $15 and can be purchased here before October 1. No walk-ins, please.
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Willipa Bay AiR, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and a recipient of a 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.” Her stories, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She has completed residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, The Circus Hotel (through The Reader Berlin), and Ragdale. In addition, she has been included in New City’s Lit 50 list as well as the Guild Literary Complex’s list of 30 Writers to Watch. Originally from rural Wisconsin, Rachel earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Western Michigan University. She has taught writing and literature at The School of the Art Institute - Chicago, Cornell College, Western Michigan University, and Kalamazoo College. She lives in Chicago.
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