Lit Youngstown offers readings by local poets
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
Lit Youngstown will present two regional poets – Kevin Haworth and Steven Reese – against a backdrop of literary-inspired visual arts at its monthly Readers Series on Wednesday.
The group will meet at 5 p.m. at Suzie’s Dogs and Drafts, 34 N. Phelps St., for the multimedia art show, then move to the Soap Gallery, 117 S. Champion St., at 7:15 p.m. for the readings.
The art show, “Silence is Golden,” is produced annually by Youngstown State University art students, who this year are creating art based on Lit Youngstown’s Words Made Visible literary-visual arts project, featuring the poems and stories of Ohio-affiliated writers.
Haworth is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in creative writing and is the director of the master’s degree program in creative writing at Carlow University. He is the author of the novel “The Discontinuity of Small Things,” which won the Samuel Goldberg Foundation Prize, and was a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Price.
Reese is the author of three volumes of poetry, “Enough Light to Steer By,” “American Dervish” and “Excentrica: Notes on the Text,” and two volumes of translation, “Synergos” (selected poems of Roberto Manzano) and “Womanlands” (selected poems of Diana Mar a Ivizate Gonz °lez).
He is a professor of literature and poetry at Youngstown State University, where he also serves as the director of the Northeast Ohio MFA in Creative Writing.
Lit Youngstown is also offering a six-week writing workshop taught by local writer William R. Soldan beginning in November.
The “Amplifying Voice in Fiction” workshop series will assist writers in developing voice and personal style in their work through lecture, discussion, practice and critique.
The workshops will take place at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 323 Wick Ave., on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. from Nov. 4 to Dec. 9. Registration is available online at LitYoungstown.com until Wednesday.
Soldan holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from YSU and is a recent graduate of the Northeast Ohio MFA program.