WANA LIVE! Reading Series

Amy Clark was born in the heart of the Appalachian mountains of Virginia and teaches at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. She is the 2012 recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in Appalachian Writing. Her book, TALKING APPALACHIAN details the history and features of Appalachian dialects, as well as pieces by well-known authors about what it means to speak them. She is

Cat Pleska, author, educator, publisher, and oral historian, holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. Her memoir, Riding on Comets was published by West Virginia University Press, 2015. Cat edited three anthologies and her essays have appeared in Still: The Journal, Heartwood Magazine, Change 7 Magazine, and many others.

In honor of baseball season, WANA is featuring a double header tonight! Cody McDevitt is an investigative reporter based in Pittsburgh. He's written several books, including his most recent, Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania, which details one of the worst racial injustices in western Pennsylvania history. More than 2,000 Black and Latino people were forced f

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as several chapbooks of poetry, including A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, winner of the 2008 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Prize. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire and teaches writing at Plymouth State University.

Patricia Thrushart has published three books of poetry, Little Girl Against The Wall, Yin and Yang, and Sanctity: Poems from Northern Appalachia. Her work appears regularly in The Watershed Journal, a regional literary magazine of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and on the website North/South Appalachia. Her poems have been published in Tiny Seed, Clarion University’s Tobeco, The Avoc

A native of Loretto, Pennsylvania now living in Pittsburgh, Ron Donoughe is best known for his spirited realistic landscape paintings of Western Pennsylvania. He has a B.A. in Art Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and has studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California.Like many painters he has held a variety of odd jobs – landscaper, g

Savannah Sipple is the author of WWJD & Other Poems (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019), which was included on the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow Recommended LGBTQ Reading List. It explores what it is to be a queer woman in Appalachia and is rooted in its culture and in her body. A writer from east Kentucky, her writing has been published in Go Magazine, Southern Culture

Join us at Watershed Books on Main Street in Brookville, PA for WANA LIVE!'s very first in-person reading and book signing with David Drayer. Book signing begins at 6:30 PM, which will be followed by a reading at 7:00 PM. David Drayer is the author of the novels Strip Cuts, A Noble Story, Something Fierce, the novella, Attachment, and the autobiographical collection, Wayward Son: T

Judi Tarowsky was a newspaper reporter and editor for more than 25 years and wrote other people’s stories. Now, as a storyteller, she gets to tell her own.She discovered storytelling in 2006, and after winning first place in the inaugural Strand Theater Preservation Society Storytelling Festival Liar’s Contest in Moundsville, WV, began her study of the craft in earnest. She wen

Ed Simon is an Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books, a contributing editor for the History News Network, and a staff writer at The Millions, which the New York Times has called the “indispensable literary site.” He is the author of several books, most recently Furnace of this World; or, 36 Observations about Goodness.H