This Saturday, March 1, Jason Lucarelli and I will be hosting the Writers’ Showcase at The Vintage in downtown Scranton. The reading starts at 7, and I’m excited about our line-up! It should be  great night.  Our featured readers are Laura Duda, Jeff Rath, Emmalea Russo, Kevin McDonough, Amanda J. Bradley, and Le Hinton. Here is a list of their bios and here is a link to a feature story The Weekender just published on Le Hinton and the reading.

In addition to writing, Laura Duda’s creative outlets include a custom line of art called BarnYard Art where she utilizes recycled materials – old barn wood, barbed wire, saw blades, horse shoes, etc. – and natural elements to create art and jewelry.  She has also had gallery showings of her digital nature photography. She and her husband operate a horse drawn carriage business and reside on a small horse farm in Fell Township, Pennsylvania.  She an adjunct instructor in the humanities division at Lackawanna College, and co-chair of both the Creative Arts Club and First Friday Committee. She is also an adjunct faculty member at Southern New Hampshire University as an instructor in English composition and creative writing. Laura is a Spring 2013 graduate of the Wilkes University Creative Writing Master of Arts program where she focused on fiction and nonfiction.  She has had fiction published in the Osterhaut Library’s Word Fountain, and her non-fiction short story “Bonnie” was published in the Fall 2012 edition of the East Meets West American Writer’s Review; the story won honorable mention in the 2012 Fall Writer’s Contest.

Jeff Rath is the author of three collections of poetry: The Waiting Room at the End of the World (2007), In the Shooting Gallery of the Heart (2009) and Film Noir (2011), all published by Iris G. Press. His works have been published in a number of journals including Everyday Genius and Fledgling Rag. He is the 2007 R.E. Foundation Award winner and a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Emmalea Russo is a poet and visual artist making process-based works. Recent work has appeared in Two Serious Ladies and THE VOLTA. She is the author of they (an artist book made from thread and Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, GAUSS PDF, 2014), and the chapbooks book of southern and water (Poor Claudia, 2013) and CLEAR1NG (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Kevin McDonough is a full-time Assistant Professor at Lackawanna College. He teaches a range of English and writing courses including College Writing, Introduction to Literature, Women’s Literature, American Literature to 1900, and Language, Literacy, and Play. Kevin also works as an adjunct professor for Marywood University’s English department, teaching Composition and Rhetoric, Children’s Literature, and Structured Linguistics. He spends his time outside of the classroom writing and performing original music—and working on short fiction. His New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to actually start submitting his stories.

Amanda J. Bradley has two books of poems out from NYQ Books: Hints and Allegations was released in 2009 and Oz at Night in 2011. She has published poetry and essays in many journals including Kin Poetry Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, The Best American Poetry Blog, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry Bay. She was interviewed in The Huffington Post in April 2013. Amanda is a graduate of the MFA program at The New School, and she holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She is an Assistant Professor at Keystone College.

Le Hinton is the author of four poetry collections including, most recently, Black on Most Days (Iris G. Press, 2008) and The God of Our Dreams (Iris G. Press, 2010). His work has been published in Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, Unshod Quills, Watershed, Off the Coast, and in the poetry anthology/cookbook, Cooking Up South. His poem “Epidemic” was the winner of the Baltimore Review’s 2013 Winter Issue contest. In 2012, his poem, “Our Ballpark,” was incorporated into Derek Parker’s sculpture Common Thread and installed at Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as part of the Poetry Paths project.