The Writers
Lori Jakiela
Lori Jakiela is the author of eight books, including three memoirs: Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature; They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice: On Cancer, Love, and Living Even So, and All Skate: True Tales from Middle Life. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Review of Books, The Journal of the Plague Years, among others. A former international flight attendant, Jakiela directs the writing program at The University of Pittsburgh’s Greensburg campus. She has been on the faculty of The San Miguel de Allende International Writing Workshops, The Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, and is a former director of The Chautauqua Writers Center. The novelist Stewart O'Nan said: ""Lori Jakiela is the queen of the wise one-liner."
Beth Alvarado
Beth Alvarado is an essayist, fiction writer, and screenwriter. Her essay collection, Anxious Attachments, was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and won a 2020 Oregon Book Award. Alvarado’s lyric memoir, Anthropologies, and her first story collection, Not a Matter of Love, burn with the landscape of the Southwest and the quiet passions of those who live there. She has taught at the University of Arizona and for the OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.
Dave Newman: Fiction
Dave Newman, a recent Pushcart winner for fiction, is the author of eleven books, including Dope and Vodka and Cigarettes, and Not Shaving Her Legs, Better Than the Best American Poetry, and the story collection She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall. Among his honors, Newman won the Andre Dubus Prize for the Novella. Newman lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela. He currently teaches in the Creative and Professional Writing Program at The University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, his alma mater.
Susan Zakin: Literary Technique
Susan Zakin is a journalist, author, and editor. The Christian Science Monitor described her first book, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement (Viking): "Susan Zakin's writing is brilliant and irreverent, tough and funny, opinionated and sometimes outrageous. But this is also a serious work, the most thorough and thoughtful survey of the American environmental movement I have seen." After writing for GQ, Vogue, Salon, The New York Times and others, she stepped back to earn an MFA in fiction from the University of Arizona. She was a John Heinz Fellow in Environmental Writing in Madagascar, a Nonfiction Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and taught writing and literature at Suffolk University in Dakar, Senegal. In 2020, she founded Journal of the Plague Years, a magazine that blurs the boundaries between journalism and literary writing, publishing such luminaries as Steve Erickson, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Mikal Gilmore, Lawrence Osborne, Thrity Umrigar and her fellow workshop leaders.
