Reading

Story Club Pgh’s monthly nonfiction storytelling series mixes the spontaneity of an open mic with the experience of live theater. Organized and hosted by the former producers of The Moth Pittsburgh and presented at City of Asylum.
Every show has both spontaneous tellers and featured performers, all taking the stage to share stories based on a theme.
July's theme is : Freedom

Join City of Asylum and Story Club Pittsburgh for a new monthly nonfiction storytelling series, mixing the spontaneity of an open mic with the experience of live theater. Organized and hosted by the former producers of The Moth Pittsburgh. 
Every show has both spontaneous tellers and featured performers, all taking the stage to share stories based on a theme.

A grandfather who was said to move clouds with his mind…his daughter who lost her memory in a childhood accident and began to see and hear the dead…and his daugter’s daughter, Ingrid, who lost her memory in an accident at twenty-three and unlike her mother, returned with no supernatural gifts…  NY Times best selling author Ingrid Rojas Contreras dives into her own family history in her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, and explores the meaning of inheritance, healing, and the power of story.
Joined in conversation by Elaine Castillo, whose new collection of essays, How to Read Now, delves into the politics and ethics of reading and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. 

Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. An ancestor was accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. In her debut book, Ancestor Trouble, Newton uses genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own family and to argue for the transformational possibilities of reclaiming and reckoning with our ancestors. 
In conversation with Geeta Kothari.

Join City of Asylum and fiction writers Amitava Kumar, Kiran Desai, and Suketu Mehta to reflect on Salman’s legacy from his imaginative use of language and joyousness in his fiction, to his belief that writing allows us to cross borders and learn from one another, to his commitment to promoting literature that allows our society to safely grapple with social injustices.
This program is a celebration of Salman Rushdie, the legacy of his literary work and advocacy, and a commitment to the power and necessity of the written word.

This is a virtual-only event
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy.
In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty--with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight--breathes life into tales of family and community bonds as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family's unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.

Angie Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her novel, Dominicana, was the inaugural book pick for Good Morning America book club and chosen as the 2019/2020 Wordup Uptown Reads. It was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, The Aspen Words Literary Prize, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. It was named most anticipated/ best book in 2019 by Time, Newsweek, People, Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Esquire. She’s published shorter works in The Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast and other journals. She's the founder and Editor-in-chief of the award winning literary journal, Aster(ix)  and is currently an Associate Professor at University of Pittsburgh. She divides her time between Pittsburgh, New York, and Turin.

Award winning author Gary Shteyngart visits City of Asylum in person to read from and discuss his NY Times best-selling novel Our Country Friends. 
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gather in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, relationships will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate what matters most. 
The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
The novel is elegiac and very, very funny, and Gary’s visit promises to be just as ripe with emotion and laughs. 

Neustadt Prize winning author Dubravka Ugrešić joins us to read from and discuss her newest work "Thank You for Not Reading." A very funny and biting critique of book publishing: agents, subagents, and scouts, supermarket-like bookstores, book fairs that have little to do with books, and authors promoted because of sex appeal instead of merit, this collection is a perfect examination for modern day readers. In conversation with Nina Herzog from the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This event has been POSTPONED. A new date will be announced as soon as possible.

Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose is a literary collection that reflects the realities of life for Pittsburghers with disabilities. It is the creative culmination of two years of connection and work between 11 multilingual, multiply disabled, and multiply abled Pittsburgh writers and 11 Pittsburghers with disabilities. It is an intimate collaboration recounting what it means to translate oneself into an abled world, and the dynamic and textured diversity of lives pursued in our city. 

Russian poet Dmitry Bykov nearly died in a poisoning, then found himself banned from teaching and pursuing his work as a public figure. Essayist Pwaangulongii Dauod received death threats for writing about queer culture in his native Nigeria. Cartoonist Pedro X. Molina watched as Nicaraguan state forces jailed his colleagues and occupied the offices of the newspaper where he published his work. Novelist Anouar Rahmani was threatened with imprisonment for writing about human rights in Algeria. 
All four were forced to flee their homelands and live in the US Cities of Asylum network (Pittsburgh, Ithaca, and Detroit). Now all four share the stage for the first time, sharing their experiences, their writings, and their commitments to creative freedom of expression.