PGHwrites: Free Association Reading Series

The Free Association Reading series, founded by Pat Hart and Mark Nieson, showcases local writers sharing new writing and works in progress. This month’s reading spotlights writers Malcolm Culleton, Donna Wojnar Dzurilla, Catherine Gammon, and Camille Rankine. 

“Free Association readings began in 2016 for established and emerging writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction,” explains Pat. “As the name implies, Free Association is not affiliated with a university or writing program but is for all, for established and emerging writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.”

Pat was inspired to start this series after watching a low-quality recording of a Flannery O’Connor reading on YouTube. “You couldn’t even really see Flannery, but the audience reaction was gripping, they laughed with her when it was funny and they went dead silent at the horror. It was such a powerful experience for the audience and for her as well,” said Pat.

Pat is no stranger to the fact that writing can be very isolating. She knows how hard it is to tell what works and what doesn’t. With Flannery O’Connor’s reading in mind, the Free Association Reading Series seemed like the natural choice to help bring community—and fun—back into writing.

About the Artists:

Malcolm Culleton is a fiction and nonfiction writer from southeastern Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in The Ignatian, Marrow Magazine, Floyd County Moonshine, Confetti, and is forthcoming in The Woven Tale. His memoir in progress, Twelve Gates to the City, is about attempting to become a street musician in New Orleans and failing catastrophically.
Malcolm received his MFA from Chatham University in 2023. He currently teaches writing at Chatham University and the Community College of Allegheny County and spends his free time hand-drawing maps, walking his dog, and playing sandlot baseball.

Donna Wojnar Dzurilla earned her MFA from Carlow University (Pittsburgh PA), where she studied at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Her fiction and non-fiction appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers Ann Pancake Volume 16, Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen, Northern Appalachia Review, Voices from the Attic series, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Presence, Shelia-Na-Gig Short Fiction Anthology Series Volume II (forthcoming 2025), and other publications. Donna’s poetry has appeared in the Backbone Mountain Review, Rune Literary Journal, The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: Pittsburgh Poems (forthcoming 2025), and photography in Trailer Park Quarterly Volume 15. As a writer-in-residence in 2022, she conducted a ten-week workshop for low-income single mothers as part of a collaboration between Carlow and Slippery Rock Universities and the non-profit, When SheThrives. The Sundress Academy for the Arts awarded Donna a writers residency at Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee in February 2025.

Catherine Gammon is the author of the story collection The Gunman and the Carnival from Baobab Press (2024), and the novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (2023), China Blue (2021), Sorrow (2013), and Isabel Out of the Rain (1991). Catherine’s fiction has appeared in literary magazines for many years and has received support from the NEA, NYFA, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. Throughout the 1990s, Catherine served on the MFA faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. A native of Los Angeles, she was ordained and trained as a Soto Zen priest by San Francisco Zen Center’s Tenshin Reb Anderson and leads Pittsburgh’s Neighborhood Zen sangha in Greenfield, where she lives with a garden and a cat.

Camille Rankine is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. Her first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her chapbook, Slow Dance with Trip Wire, was selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Discovery Poetry Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She co-chairs the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council and is an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant Cucina Alfabeto is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, but a cash wine bar will be available.