Lit Youngstown’s Fall Literary Festival features readings, craft talks, writing workshops and a publishing panel, by acclaimed and accomplished faculty from Ohio and around the country. We welcome readers, writers, teachers & students of poetry, historical fiction, speculative fiction, memoir & film. Most appropriate for adults and older youth.

Register here. Cost for the day-long event: $25, includes sessions, morning coffee & pastries, lunch, cake, & cocktail reception. Convenient e-pay here.

Scholarships available for those who need assistance. Email Info@LitYoungstown.org.

Please let us know if you need accommodations.

Itinerary

8:00-9:00 St. John’s Episcopal Church Great Hall
Coffee, Pastries, Registration

8:30-9:45 St. John’s Episcopal Church Great Hall
Poetry Through an Editor’s Eyes, Slapering Hol Press editors Susana H. Case & Margo Taft Stever (bring two poems in progress)
Prose Workshop, Christopher Barzak
Memoir Workshop, Kelly Bancroft

10:00-10:50 Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County
“Laying the Foundation: Concrete Imagery in Poetry,” Denise Duhamel
“Writing Historical Fiction: The Ever Unfolding Drama,” Robert Olmstead
“Not the Whole Truth: Writing Memoir,” Kelly Bancroft

11:00-11:45 Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County
Fiction Reading, Robert Olmstead

12:00 St. John’s Episcopal Church Great Hall
Lunch by Cultivate Co-op Café

1:00-1:45 St. John’s Episcopal Church Sanctuary
Poetry Reading, Susana Case & Margo Taft Stever

2:00-3:00 St. John’s Episcopal Church Great Hall
On Publishing: Discussion and Q&A with Nin Andrews, Kelly Bancroft, Christopher Barzak,  Susana H. Case, Denise Duhamel, Robert Olmstead, Margo Taft Stever

3:00-3:30 St. John’s Episcopal Church Great Hall
Screening of Kelly Bancroft’s short film Arriving at Bessie
Cake by Selah Restaurant

3:30-4:30 St. John’s Episcopal Church Sanctuary
Poetry Reading: Nin Andrews & Denise Duhamel

4:30 St. John’s Episcopal Church Sanctuary
Cocktail Reception

Faculty

Nin Andrews’s poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Best American Poetry, Best American Prose Poems, Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction, The House of Your Dreams: An International Collection of Prose Poems, Seriously Funny, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, she is the author of six chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections. Why God Is a Woman won the 2016 Ohioana award in poetry; her most recent is Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017).

Kelly Bancroft won an Ohio Arts Council individual artist award and Ragdale writer residencies. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Mudfish, XConnect, Jezebel and TIME, among others. A short documentary based on her family research was selected for this year’s Cleveland International Film Festival. She is currently working on a full-length play and short essays in memoir.

Christopher Barzak is author of the Crawford Fantasy Award novel, One for Sorrow, made into Jamie Marks is Dead, a Sundance feature film. The Love We Share Without Knowing was a finalist for the Nebula Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Wonders of the Invisible World, (Knopf, 2015) received the Stonewall Honor Award from the American Library Association. He is author of two collections: Birds and Birthdays, surrealist fantasy stories, and Before and Afterlives, supernatural fantasies, which won Best Collection in the 2013 Shirley Jackson Awards. He teaches fiction writing in the NEOMFA program at YSU.

Susana H. Case is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press, 2017)and 4 Rms w Vu from Mayapple Press, as well as four chapbooks. One of her collections, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press in Poland. Her poems appear widely in magazines and anthologies. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other titles include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009); Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005); Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001); The Star-Spangled Banner (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); and Kinky (Orhisis, 1997).  She and Maureen Seaton co-authored CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Duhamel is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  The guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

Robert Olmstead is the author of seven novels, the memoir Stay Here With Me, and River Dogs, a collection of short stories.  His three most recent novels, known as the Childs Trilogy: Coal Black Horse, Far Bright Star, and The Coldest Night, have been optioned by Casey Affleck.  Far Bright Star, declared one of the top ten westerns of the decade by Booklist will be directed by Affleck and star Joaquin Phoenix. Olmstead’s many awards include two Ohioana Book Awards, Amazon Top 100, Kirkus Top 25, Publisher’s Weekly Top 100, a Spur Award for Best Novel from the Western Writers of America, Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, a #1 Pick Booksense, Senior Arts Fellowships from Ohio and Pennsylvania, Idaho Press Club Award and Black Warrior Review Fiction Award, as well as Fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Margo Taft Stever’s four poetry collections are The Lunatic Ball, Kattywompus Press, 2015; The Hudson Line, Main Street Rag, 2012; Frozen Spring, Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry, 2002; and Reading the Night Sky, Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition, 1996. In 2019, CRACKED PIANO, will be published by CavanKerry Press. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies including Blackbird, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, Poem-A-Day, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, Webster Review, Dire Elegies, Chance of a Ghost, and No More Masks. She is the founder of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and the founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. For more information, please see: www.margostever.com.

Profound thanks to our community partners making this festival possible: The Nathalie & James Andrews Foundation for their generosity and encouragement; Rector Gayle Catinella and the congregation of St. John’s Episcopal Church, who envision the church as an artistic hub in our community; 

Jo Nolfi and the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County, whose dedication to literacy and the literary arts dovetails our own; and the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts, an academic home for creative literary excellence.