Celebrating Big!

Lit Youngstown is going all out this April for National Poetry Month!

Each day, we will add a poetry-writing prompt. We’ve invited poets who read for us in 2015 to offer a prompt, and many of them did. We appreciate it!

We also have some wonderful events planned, on different days, in different places.

Wed. April 6 @ 7:00, Suzie’s Dogs & Drafts, 32 N. Phelps St. Ohio poets Barbara Sabol of Cuyahoga Falls & Adam Hughes of Lancaster headline our First Wednesday Reading Series. Open mic to follow, moderated by Youngstown novelist Adam Stevens.

Adam Hughes

Adam Hughes is the author of Petrichor (NYQ Books, 2010) and Uttering the Holy (NYQ Books, 2012). His collection Allow the Stars to Catch Me When I Rise is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. He was born in 1982 in Lancaster. He still resides near there on a farm with his wife and daughter, two dogs, four cats, and five horses. Should you google him, he is not the Adam Hughes who draws near-pornographic depictions of female superheroes. He cannot draw.

Barbara Sabol

Barbara Sabol is the author of two poetry chapbooks and her work has most recently appeared in The Examined Life, San Pedro River Review, Ekphrasis, Common Ground Review, Chrysanthemum, and Modern Haiku, as well as in a handful of anthologies. Barbara reviews poetry books for the blog Poetry Matters. She is a speech therapist who lives and works in Cuyahoga Falls, with her husband and two wonder dogs.

Mon. April 11 @ noon to 1:00, Gallagher’s Lunch Bucket, 345 Oak Hill Ave. Poems & Lunch at Gallagher’s! Bring your food poems, your song lyrics, your limericks, your sonnet on Pizza, your elegy to Meatloaf.

Pizza: Metaphor for Life

Meatloaf! Be Inspired

Thurs. April 14 @ 7:00, The Thomases Family Gallery at the Jewish Comm

Let’s Go Headfirst by Carol Gallo

unity Center, 505 Gypsy Lane.

The Jewish Community Center and Lit Youngstown present a reading with Mari Alschuler, Kelly Bancroft & Arya-Francesca Jenkins. The reading coincides with Collective Resonance:  An Exhibition of Women Artists, featuring works by Carol Gallo, Joy White, Jody Nudell, Blanche Weiss & Tazim Jaffer.

Nin Andrews & Karen Schubert will lead an ekphrastic poetry writing workshop before the reading, at 6:00pm.

Sun. April 24 @2:00, The Soap Gallery, 117 S. Champion St. Youngstown Poets Allison Davis & Rochelle Hurt visit home. Join us for poems in this beautiful new downtown gallery.

Allison Davis is a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work is forthcoming in Crazyhorse and The Best American Poetry 2016. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute. She is the author of Poppy Seeds (KSU Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her full-length collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, is forthcoming from Baobab Press in 2017.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of two poetry collections: In Which I Play the Runaway (forthcoming in fall 2016), selected by Richard Blan

co as the winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City, a novel in poems published in White Pine Press’s Marie Alexander Series (2014). Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2013 and awarded literary prizes from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, and Poetry International. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in journals like Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, and The Southeast Review. A native of Youngstown, she is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati and Assistant Editor for the Cincinnati Review.

April 30, @noon to 5:00 p.m. Artists of the Mahoning Commons Spring Sale, Ward Bakery, 1024 Mahoning Ave.

Lit Youngstown hosts an afternoon of literary arts.

Visit the tables of Flutterby Books, Extending Grace Antiques & Vintage and The Cranky Pressman, where you’ll find new books, handcrafted journals, and letterpressed broadsides, and linger for poetry readings, book signings and music.

Poets & Musicians 

1:00 Craig Paulenich 1:30 Jon Locketti 2:00 Clarissa Jacobsons 2:30 Angie DeNicholas 3:00 Eric Anderson 3:30 Susan Wojnar 4:00 Arya Francesca Jenkins 4:30 Lynn Cardwell

At the Lit Youngstown table, we will have t-shirts and bookmarks for sale, as well as chances to win an original watercolor by Chris Leeper. We’ll have a poem-in-progress on the Mother of All Chalkboards, and we invite you to add a line.