LOCAL

LOCAL

Poetry reading

YOUNGSTOWN — Pig Iron Literary and Art Works will have its monthly Open Poetry Reading on March 10 at Tomasino’s Pizza, 103 Federal Plaza West. Sign-up will be at the door until 7:45 p.m., and the reading begins at 8. Readers are invited.

Book draws attention to the real victims

TRUMBULL COUNTY — How appropriate that Douglas Darnall has chosen these uncertain times to author a book that provides help for parents contemplating a future as single households or as blended families.

In his book, “Divorce Casualties,” Darnall, who has nine outpatient mental health clinics in northeastern Ohio and Pennsylvania, makes it apparent that children are the ones who often suffer the most when parents separate.

Too often they are caught in the emotional crossfire when parents continue to wage a bitter battle about such issues as child support and visitation rights for years after the divorce.

Darnall offers suggestions that will help parents recognize how the conflicts can be avoided and how all the parties will benefit from working with attorneys, parent coordinators, mediators and counselors.

Darnall is internationally recognized as an expert on parental alienation and parental alienation syndrome.

“Divorce Casualties” is published by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. and is distributed by National Book Network.

Awards

PEN/Faulkner

NEW YORK — Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” an acclaimed post-Sept. 11 novel bypassed for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle prize, has finally received a literary honor: the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

The choice was announced Feb. 26 by Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, directors of the Washington-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

O’Neill, whose book is narrated by a man who lived in downtown Manhattan at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks, will receive $15,000. The finalists — Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Ms. Hempel Chronicles,” Susan Choi’s “A Person of Interest,” Richard Price’s “Lush Life” and Ron Rash’s “Serena” — each get $5,000.

Previous winners include Philip Roth, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow.

Due out this month

Starbucks to feature ‘L&O’ star’s memoir

NEW YORK — A memoir by Isabel Gillies, who plays Kathy Stabler on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” will be the next book featured at Starbucks stores around the country.

Gillies’ “Happens Every Day,” which tells of the collapse of her marriage to DeSales Harrison, will be published March 24 by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.

In a statement released by Starbucks, Gillies calls her book a story of “loving your life even when it’s falling apart.” Gillies, 39, is now married to Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Lattman.

Previous Starbucks picks include Helene Cooper’s “The House at Sugar Beach” and Mitch Albom’s “For One More Day.”

Combined dispatches