Creative non-fiction rock stars David Giffels of Akron and Lori Jakiela of Pittsburgh travel all the way to Youngstown to read us some stories. Open mic to follow, emceed by Y-town creative non-fiction writer and recent NEOMFA grad Tom Pugh.
Wed. May 3 @ 7:00 PM, Suzie’s Dogs & Drafts, 34 N. Phelps St.
David Giffels is the author of The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches From the Rust Belt (Scribner 2014), nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the memoir All the Way Home (William Morrow/HarperCollins 2008), winner of
the Ohioana Book Award. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic.com, Parade, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire.com, Grantland.com, and Redbook. He also was a writer for the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is an associate professor of English at University of Akron, where he teaches creative nonfiction in the NEOMFA Program.
Lori Jakiela is the author of three memoirs, most recently Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Atticus Books 2015), which received the 2016 Saroyan Prize for International Writing from Stanford University, was a finalist for the CLMP’s Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Literary Award, and named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. Jakiela also received the 2015 City of
Asylum Pittsburgh Prize and a month-long residency at the Passa Porta Literary Center in Brussels, Belgium. She is also the author the poetry collection Spot the Terrorist! (Turning Point, 2013). Her essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and Brevity. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. She also co-directs the summer writers festival at Chautauqua Institution. She lives outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, the writer Dave Newman, and their children. Her website is lorijakiela.net.