Tonight: Downtown Gallery Crawl, Tomorrow Wood Fired Words

A particularly packed full Gallery Crawl of exhibits and events occurs tonight.
For information go here
Then tomorrow, Wood Fired Words in Braddock at Unsmoke Systems.
Wood-Fired Words

A literary event curated by Sherrie Flick of the Gist Street Reading Series

Saturday, October 1st
7pm – 10pm. Reading at 8pm.
Admission is $5.
Wood-fired pizza & BYOB drinks.

The 3rd annual Wood-Fired Words will feature a fiction reading by Josh Barkan, Braddock’s first Into the Furnace Writer-in-Residence. The event will also include live music by The Emily Pinkerton Trio, The East End Book Exchange pop-up used bookstore, paintings from the “Meet the News Team” series by John Fleenor, and wood-fired pizza baked in Braddock’s community pizza oven.

Into the Furnace is a new writer-in-residence program in Braddock, PA. The selected writer is housed in a two-room suite in the former St. Michael’s parochial school convent, which is located beside UnSmoke Systems Artspace, across the street from the Edgar Thompson Works, and beside the community pizza oven. Into the Furnace offers an adventuresome creative person, whose work and work ethic can benefit from the energy Braddock has to offer, up to 9 months of creative work time at our urban residency.

Josh Barkan begins his Into the Furnace writing residency in September 2011. He was awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught writing at Harvard, New York University, and Boston University and is the author of the short-story collection Before Hiroshima. His first novel, Blind Speed, was named a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Fiction Prize. He spent much of his childhood abroad, living in Kenya, Tanzania, France and India. After attending Yale University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, he spent a year teaching in Japan and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared in Esquire and as a contributor to The Boston Book Review. He lives in New York City and Mexico City.

Sherrie Flick is author of a novel, Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books), and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume). Select anthologies include Flash Fiction Forward (Norton), New Sudden Fiction (Norton), and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. She has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Ucross Foundation, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She recently served as January-term writer-in-residence at Salem College. A recipient of a 2011 Work of Art Award for Artistic Vibrancy from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, she teaches at Chatham University and (for 10 years) served as Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series. Sherrie was instrumental in the creation of the Into the Furnace writing residency program.

Born in the heart of the Midwest, songwriter Emily Pinkerton has crafted a style with roots that stretch from Appalachia to the Andes. High, haunting vocals soar over pulsating guitar and banjo riffs that draw from a decade of travel between her hometown of Valparaiso, Indiana and her second home in Valparaíso, Chile. Her bandmates include Jose Layo Puentes, Lucas Savage and Daniel Marcus.

The East End Book Exchange was founded in the summer of 2011 on two simple ideas: love of books and love of Pittsburgh. It is a pop-up used bookstore dedicated to connecting booklovers and books in the heart of Pittsburgh’s East End. Each weekend, The East End Book Exchange appears in a community space or local business in a different neighborhood.

John Fleenor is a painter living in Pittsburgh with his wife, Helen, and his daughter, Zephy. His “Meet the News Team” series features portraits of 25 news anchors from stations across the country. Fleenor created this series during a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2009.

Wood-Fired Words is supported by Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts (PA Partners), the regional arts funding partnership of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency. State government funding comes through an annual appropriation by Pennsylvania’s General Assembly and from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. PA Partners is administered in Allegheny County by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council.
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