Fall Literary Festival Featured Presenters Jill Christman and Alison Stine read from their work, followed by a Q&A with Jen Knox. Introductions by Sandra Beasley. This reading, free and open to the public, concludes the 2023 Fall Literary Festival.
Saturday, October 21 at 7:00pm at Penguin City Ballroom 460 E. Federal Street. With many thanks to our sponsors the Centofanti Foundation, the Grace Ruth Memorial Endowment, Youngstown State University Center for Working-Class Studies, WYSU-FM, the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley and the Youngstown Foundation.
Jill Christman is a 2020 NEA Prose Fellow and the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays and two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of the AWP Prize for CNF) and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. Her essays have appeared in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A senior editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and executive producer of the podcast Indelible: Campus Sexual Violence, she teaches creative nonfiction writing and literary editing at Ball State University.
Alison Stine is the author of the novels Trashlands (MIRA / HarperCollins) and Road Out of Winter, winner of the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of three poetry collections and a novella. Her plays and musicals have been performed at the Cleveland Playhouse and Off-Broadway at the Trilogy Theatre. Her next novel Dust will be published by Wednesday Books (Macmillan) in 2024. Recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a grant from the Ohio Arts Council, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Ruth Lilly Fellow, and received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism. In 2022, she was voted Top Author by 5280 magazine for their “Top of the Town” issue. Partially deaf, she works as a Staff Culture Writer at Salon, and has reported for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, 100 Days in Appalachia, and more. She was raised in rural Ohio.
Jen Knox was a high school dropout who went on to find purpose through writing, which led her to earn a BA in English from Otterbein and an MFA from Bennington. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction are taught in classrooms and appear in over two hundred publications around the world. Jen's first novel, We Arrive Uninvited, won the Steel Toe Books Award in Prose. jenknox.com