WANA LIVE! Reading Series
WANA LIVE! is the reading series of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia, which livestreams on YouTube and Facebook every Thursday night at 8 PM EST. New episodes of the WANA LIVE! podcast will be uploaded two weeks after their livestream date. Learn more about WANA at https://writersassociationofnorthernappalachia.org/. Intro music: "Back to the Patch" by Sue Powers. You can find more of her music at https://www.devilishmerry.com/.
Episodes
June 19, 2021 • 25 mins
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 founder and Director of the Appalachian Writing Pr...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 14 mins
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.
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 40 mins
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 from their homes after a racially charged police sho...
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 from their homes after a racially charged police sho...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 20 mins
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.
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 24 mins
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 Avocet, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post ...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 26 mins
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, gravedigger, chicken catcher, art teacher, museum inst...
Like many painters he has held a variety of odd jobs – landscaper, gravedigger, chicken catcher, art teacher, museum inst...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 22 mins
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 Cultures, Split This Rock, Salon, and other places. She i...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 15 mins
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: Travels and Reflections. Born in the small town of R...
David Drayer is the author of the novels Strip Cuts, A Noble Story, Something Fierce, the novella, Attachment, and the autobiographical collection, Wayward Son: Travels and Reflections. Born in the small town of R...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 17 mins
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 went on to earn a Graduate Certificate in Storytelling fro...
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 went on to earn a Graduate Certificate in Storytelling fro...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 27 mins
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.
His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Rev...
His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Rev...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 14 mins
Ed McClanahan, a native of northeastern Kentucky, is the author of The Natural Man, Famous People I Have Known, and five other books, most recently Not Even Immortality Lasts Forever (Counterpoint, 2020). He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, two Yaddo Fellowships, and an Al Smith Fellowship. He and his wife Hilda live in Lexington, Kentucky.
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 18 mins
Tiffany Williams is a native of Eastern Kentucky. She is a coal miner's daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter and an exciting emerging voice who crafts achingly beautiful songs about what it means, in her experience, to be from the Appalachian Mountains.
Her debut EP, When You Go, released January 18, 2019, features five tracks, all of which were penned by the artist and are a meditation on life in the mountains—a place, ...
Her debut EP, When You Go, released January 18, 2019, features five tracks, all of which were penned by the artist and are a meditation on life in the mountains—a place, ...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 28 mins
Join us as we celebrate WANA LIVE!'s first birthday! Our writer this week is the incomparable Jennifer Haigh AND we will be announcing an exciting new WANA LIVE! initiative as a thank you for being here with us this past year.
JENNIFER HAIGH is a novelist and short story writer. Her novel HEAT AND LIGHT won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, Th...
JENNIFER HAIGH is a novelist and short story writer. Her novel HEAT AND LIGHT won a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, Th...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 18 mins
lison Stine grew up in rural Ohio. Her first novel Road Out of Winter is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her other books include three collections of poetry. Recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and National Geographic, she has published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her next novel Trashlands will be published by MIRA/HarperCollins in October.
* * * * * * * * * *
http://www.aliso...
* * * * * * * * * *
http://www.aliso...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 17 mins
Sandee Gertz is a native of Western Pennsylvania and the author of The Pattern Maker's Daughter (Poems, Bottom Dog Press). Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Green Mountains Review, and more. The Write Launch has recently featured her memoir writing. She is a Sandburg-Livesay Award winner and was featured as one of 16 Working Class Poets in World Literature Today. She teaches at Cumberland University outside of Nashvil...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 21 mins
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015).
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 20 mins
Omope Carter Daboiku grew up in Ironton along the Ohio River in Lawrence County, Ohio, defined as northcentral Appalachia; and, cherished annual family trips “back home” to extended families living in both the Blue Ridge of Virginia and the Smokies along the TN/GA borderlands. Trained as a cultural geographer, her writing explores the dynamics of her mixed ancestry family, migration, and the internal angst of being a “hillbilly” in...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 10 mins
Tommy Dean is the author of the flash fiction chapbook Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. The Editor at Fractured Lit, Dean’s work has appeared in the BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. His stories have been included in the Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He is the winner of the Lascaux Review Short Story Prize 2019. Find him @TommyD...
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 14 mins
John Lawson has taught writing and rhetoric at Robert Morris University for twenty-two years. His poetry collection, Generations, was published by the St. Andrews University Press, and his poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Vox Populi, and many other print and online venues. He also writes plays and stories
Mark as Played
June 19, 2021 • 14 mins
Sherrie Flick is the author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness and two short story collections, Whiskey, Etc. and Thank Your Lucky Stars. Her stories have been performed for Selected Shorts and appear in Ploughshares, New World Writing, and Wigleaf, as well as Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, and New Micro. She is co-editor for Flash Fiction America, forthcoming from Norton in 2022.
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.
A straightforward look at the day's top news in 20 minutes. Powered by ABC News. Hosted by Brad Mielke.