Free Association Reading Series

Featured Writers:

Erinn Batykefer earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of ALLEGHENY, MONONGAHELA (Red Hen Press), THE ARTIST’S LIBRARY (Coffee House Press), and  EPITHALAMIA, winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Chapbook Prize. She served as co-founder and editor of The Library as Incubator Project 2010-2017 for which she was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker. She is an editorial assistant at [PANK] Magazine and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Daniela Buccilli‘s poetry chapbook is What it Takes to Carry (Main Street Rag, 2019). You can find her poems in Coal River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cider Press Review, and Italian Americana. She holds degrees in teaching and writing from Penn State, University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University. She is a co-editor for the upcoming anthology Show Us Your Papers and reads for the literary magazine Pittsburgh Poetry Journal. Her work has been anthologized in The Two Dreamers: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank, Is It Hot In Here, or Is It Me? and Madwomen from the Attic, vol 25. 

Jonathan Callard writes, lives, and sings in Pittsburgh, where he teaches for Creative Nonfiction magazine and the University of Pittsburgh and leads writing workshops at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His nonfiction has appeared in Image, Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, PublicSource, Pittsburgh Magazine, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and The Witness, among others, and has earned fellowships from the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 

Keely Bowers was a finalist for the New Rivers Press Writing Award and recipient of the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction. She has published work in Carve, Crazyhorse, Creative Nonfiction, Dickinson Review and the Chicago Tribune. She teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and Carlow University.

Curators:

Pat Hart writes plays, monologues, short stories, and novels. Playwriting credits include “Book Wench” a one-act play, performed at the Strawberry One-Act Festival, Summer 2015, New York, New York. Published short stories include “The Vigil,” The Writing Disorder (Fall 2015), “New Wife vs. Old Wife, a love story,” (2015) and “Dragon Boogers” novel excerpt (2016) in Voices in the Attic, and “Spider Ball,” Rune (May 2015). Pat has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and is the founder of Free Association, a reading series for established and emerging writers in Pittsburgh. She is currently working on a novel set in Pittsburgh and Burma during the 1920s.

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theatre, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. His memoir, SCHOOLHOUSE: Lessons on Love & Landscape, came out from Ice Cube Press in 2016. He’s won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. He teaches at Chatham University, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, HOUDINI’S HEIRS.