Free Association Reading Series April 2024

The final Free Association Reading this season features exceptional regional writers Amy M. Alvarez, Philip Terman, Anjali Sachdeva, and Jake Mayard. This series features readings from regional authors sharing established and forthcoming works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Each month’s writers are invited by Free Association founders and friends of City of Asylum, Pat Hart and Marc Nieson. The duo’s combined experience in the writing realm and love of the craft provides an essential and personal element to the series’ curation, bringing forth some of the very best writers the Pittsburgh scene has to offer. 

About the Authors:

Amy M. Alvarez is the author of the poetry collection Makeshift Altar (2024) and the co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (2023). You can find her work in Best New Poets 2022, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Poetry Foundation, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, VCCA, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center. In 2022, she was inducted as an Affrilachian Poet. Amy was born in New York City to Jamaican and Puerto Rican parents. She currently lives and teaches in West Virginia.  

Philip Terman’s books include This Crazy Devotion (Broadstone), Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House) and, as co-translator, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected poems of Riad Saleh Hussein (Bitter Oleander). A selection of his poems, “My Dear Friend Kafka” (Nimwa Press, Damascus) was translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk. His poems and essays appear in many journals and anthologies, such as Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Poetry International, The Sun, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, and Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine. He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center, a regional writers organization in western, PA, and is co-curator for the Jewish Poetry Reading Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Buffalo. Terman conducts poetry workshops and coaches writing hither and yon. He’s collaborated with composers, visual artists, and performs his poetry with the jazz band Catro. www.philipterman.com

Anjali Sachdeva is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the Chatham University MFA program. Previously, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Augustana College, and the University of Iowa. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was Director of Educational Programs. Her work includes both nonfiction and fiction, with an emphasis on speculative fiction. Her short story collection, All the Names They Used for God (2018), won the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. Her fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Vogue India, and has been featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She is the recipient of an Investing in Professional Artists Grant from the Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Jake Maynard is a writer from rural Pennsylvania whose stories and essays appear in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Electric Lit, The Baffler, The New Republic, The New York Times, and others. His debut novel Slime Line, about the lives of workers in commercial fish processing facilities, is forthcoming in June from West Virginia University Press. He lives in Pittsburgh.

About the Curators:

Pat Hart is the founder of Free Association and writes plays, short stories, and novels. She is currently revising Mala, an historical novel set in 1925 about an elephant, her Burmese handler, and the people they encounter as they travel from Burma to England, through Pittsburgh, and ultimately the Barnum and Bailey Circus in St. Louis. Playwriting credits include Book Wench, a one-act play performed at the Strawberry One-Act Festival (New York City), and “Murderous,” a 10-minute monologue performed at Practice Monologamy (Carlow University). Published short stories include “The Reader” (Every Day Fiction), “The Vigil” (The Writing Disorder), and “Spider Ball” (Rune).

Marc Nieson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and NYU Film School. His background includes children’s theater, cattle chores, and a season with a one-ring circus. He’s won a Raymond Carver Short Story Award, Pushcart Prize nominations, and been noted in Best American Essays. Schoolhouse: Lessons on Love & Landscape is his memoir (Ice Cube Press 2016). He teaches at Chatham University, edits The Fourth River, and is at work on a new novel, Houdini’s Heirs. More @ www.marcnieson.com

About Your Visit: 

The in-house restaurant 40 North is open for dinner from 5–9pm. Please visit Open Table or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.