PGHwrites: Free Association Reading Series 10th Anniversary Celebration

It’s the 10th anniversary of The Free Association Reading series, founded by Pat Hart and Marc Nieson! Over the past 10 years, the series has welcomed over 130 local writers sharing newly written work and works-in-progress. This celebratory reading will be followed by a reception for participants and attendees.

“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 Writers:

M. Soledad Caballero is a professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, postcolonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffry E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry, the Mississippi Review’s annual Editors’ prize, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poem “Myths We Tell” won the 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize for Cutthroat: a Journal of the Arts. She is a co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Connections Grant, as well as a Great Lakes Colleges Association Expanding Collaborations Initiative Grant. Her first poetry collection won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award sponsored by Red Hen Press. She splits her time between Meadville and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sheila Carter-Jones has an MFA in creative writing from Carlow University, where she created the manuscript for her book Every Hard Sweetness, which was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Sheila is a fellow of Cave Canem, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and a Walter Dakins Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her manuscript, Three Birds Deep, was selected as the winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award, and her chapbook Crooked Star Dream Book was named runner-up for the New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. Her recent chapbook, Elegy-ish, was selected as the winner of the Allison Joseph Chapbook Series-3. Her poetry has been published in several journals, anthologies, and magazines. Currently, she is working on a new manuscript of poems and a memoir. Sheila facilitates a writing workshop in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Program.

Chiwan Choi is the author of five books of poetry: The Flood, the Daughter trilogy—Abductions, The Yellow House, and my name is wolf—and Sky Songs. He wrote, presented, and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Zócalo Public Square, and other publications. Chiwan is a partner at the experimental literary laboratory Writ Large Projects, which is set to open its first physical location in Braddock, PA.

T.N. Eyer graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School. She practiced corporate law in London and in Los Angeles before happily transitioning to writing fiction full-time.  Her first novel, Finding Meaning in the Age of Immortality, was published by Stillhouse Press in November 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in december magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Water~Stone Review, among others. Her story “Date of Death” was listed as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2022, and her story “The Offer” won third place in the Bridport Prize Short Story Competition. She is an alumna of the Bread Loaf, Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, and Futurescape’s writers’ workshops. She is an avid reader, hiker, and traveler. She has gone caving in Vietnam, horseback riding in Mongolia, and sand sledding in Namibia. When she’s home, she gets most of her exercise playing Dance Dance Revolution in her garage. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband and daughter. 

Jane McCafferty is the author of four books of fiction and a book of poems. Her work has been published in The Sun, The Common, Iowa Review, Catapult, and other journals, and has been awarded two Pushcarts, an NEA, the Drue Heinz Prize, The Talking Writing award for non-fiction, and The Great Lakes Writers award. She is currently working on a collection of stories, all set in Pittsburgh. She’s taught for many years at Carnegie Mellon and for the Madwomen program through Carlow. 

Jolene McIlwain is the author of Sidle Creek, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Library Journal, and selected as Pennsylvania’s 2025 Great Reads title by the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Her work appears widely in literary journals and anthologies. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has also been recognized by Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net. McIlwain holds degrees in literature and art and has taught literary theory and composition at Duquesne and Chatham Universities. She and her family (along with two rescue cats and a feral cat clutter) run a HipCamp eco-campsite north of Pittsburgh. She’s currently working on a literary crime novel set in the same world as her story collection, Sidle Creek. 

Adriana E. Ramírez is a writer, critic, and performance poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub, among others. She occasionally reviews books for People Magazine. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, is forthcoming from Scribner.

Sarah Shotland is the author of Junkette (2014) and Abolition is Everything (2021). Her short work has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of a 2025 Special Collections Research Fellowship from Smith College, and her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Heinz Endowments. She is the Program Director for Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, where she also chairs the Art, Communications, and English Department.

Carolyn P. Speranza is a Pittsburgh-based multidisciplinary, visual, and conceptual artist. Carolyn uses light, video, and assemblage to create installation art environments, public art, and self-illuminating art objects. Her artistic activism is community-based and intersectional. She is bringing “Huggable Loveable Uterus” to life in visual art and participatory engagement, with the mission of demystifying the uterus, giving voice to those who have them. An Opportunity Fund grant supports this initiative. In 2023, Carolyn premiered “He Used to Get Away with Everything” at City of Asylum. This Spoken Word Performance pointed to the critical role bodily autonomy plays in our mental health and capacity for transformation. The video was then displayed as an installation at the University of Pittsburgh’s Frick Fine Arts building in 2024. Her 2023 “Parade as a Protest Art Form” photo exhibit connected 1990s civil rights issues with today’s and heralded the fortieth anniversary of Columbus’s Doo Dah Parade.

Marcel Lamont (M.L.) Walker is an award-winning graphic-prose creator and recognized authority on the social applications of comic-book art. He began teaching graphic prose in 1993 at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and, in 2014, became lead artist and book designer for CHUTZ-POW! SUPERHEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST, published by The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. From 2017 to 2025, he also served as the project’s editor and coordinator. He was president of the ToonSeum board of directors from 2018 to 2023. His honors include the 2016 Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Award (The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Heinz Endowments), 2017 Best Local Cartoonist (Pittsburgh City Paper), a 2018 BME Community Genius Fellowship, induction into the 2023 inaugural Righteous Among the Neighbors class (Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, The LIGHT Initiative), and designation as a 2024 Pittsburgh Cultural Treasure (The Heinz Endowments, The Ford and POISE Foundations). Today, Marcel continues his 30+ year mission of working with educators and students nationwide to champion literature and visual art as forces for social good.

About Your Visit

The in-house restaurant, Cucina Alfabeto, is open for brunch from 9:30 to 2 p.m. and for dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Please visit OpenTable or call 412-435-1111 to make a reservation.