The Inkubator is Literary Cleveland’s free annual festival for writers and readers. Generate new writing, improve your craft, and advance your career.

September 18–23

2023

cleveland
PUBLIC        LIBRARY

Inkubator

‘23

ABOUT
THE
CONFERENCE

Literary Cleveland’s Inkubator Writing Conference is one of the largest free writing festivals in the country.

From September 18-20 we will host live virtual panels with some of the best authors in the country. Our two-day in-person conference at the Cleveland Public Library on September 22-23 is our biggest ever, featuring writing workshops, panel discussions, craft talks, teen writing programs, a book fair, breakout social spaces, and an afterparty reading and celebration. Plus, we have a series of new community projects this year from September 10-24 to activate new locations and reach more people across the city.

The 2023 festival features Hanif Abdurraqib, Lydia Davis, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Hafizah Augustus Geter, Manuel Iris, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Rakesh Satyal, Clint Smith, Elissa Washuta and a keynote reading with Elizabeth Acevedo.

The Inkubator is presented as part of Cleveland Book Week in collaboration with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC).

Altogether, the Inkubator is a public celebration of writing in Cleveland that advances writers’ individual abilities, furthers artistic dialogue, fosters a more connected literary community, and invites more people to tell their stories. Registration closes September 20.

Overview

SEPTEMBER 1–30

virtual events
Monday, September 18, 7:00pm ET
Virtual Fiction / Lydia Davis & Danny Caine
 
Tuesday, September 19, 7:00pm ET
Virtual Nonfiction / Hafizah Geter & Joseph Earl homas
 
Wednesday, September 20, 7:00pm ET
Virtual Poetry / Clint Smith & Hanif Abdurraqib
Community projects
Sunday, September 10
Poetry Ride Out
Presented by Ali Black and Balance Point Studios
Thursday, September 21
Kickoff Mixer and Book Swap
Muze Gastropub at Studio West 117
Friday, September 22
Friday Dinner Mixer
Cleveland Public Library Outdoor Reading Garden
Sunday, September 24
Framing the Future: Comics Making in the Rust Belt at the West Side Market
Presented by Rust Belt Humanities Lab
September 1–30
Coaster Stories
Presented by Loganberry Books

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

book fair / 10:00am–5:00pm ET
The book fair will be open from 10:00am-5:00pm on Friday and 9:00am-5:00pm on Saturday at the conference and will feature local independent booksellers, literary journals, publishers and presses, writing groups, and literary organizations.
 
Participants so far include: Alma College, Appletree Books, Ashland University MFA in Creative Writing, Cleveland READS, Clevo Books, CSU Poetry Center, Cuyahoga County Public Library's William N. Skirball Writers' Center, Fireside Book Shop, Grieveland, ID13 Prison Literacy Project, Loganberry Books, Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry, Ohioana Library Association, Rescue Press, Rust Belt Studies, The Cupboard Pamphlet, ThirdSpace Reading Room, University of Akron Press, Visible Voice Books, Wilks University Graduate Program in Creative Writing, Write and Vibe Publishing, Writers in Residence, and more to come.
GENRE SOCIAL / 10:00AM–5:00PM ET
Looking to meet fellow writers? The Genre Social room will be open from 10:00am-5:00pm on Friday and 9:00am-5:00pm on Saturday. Stop by during or between sessions to mingle and make new friends.
11:00am–12:30pm ET
Fiction/ Three Prompts to Unlock Your Plot - Marie Vibbert
Nonfiction/ The Braided Essay: Other Possibilities, Other Selves - Stacy Jane Grover
Poetry/ Even the Least of These:  The Ten-Line Poem in the Time of Crisis - Anita Skeen
Business/ The Power of Mindset for Your Writing Life - Michele T. Berger
Beyond/ Writing Your First Book: Sticking to It - Panel
1:30pm–3:00pm ET
Fiction/ Cleveland Noir: Writing Genre - Panel
Nonfiction/ Writing About That Which We Dare Not Speak - Lara Lillibridge
Poetry/ Writing an Ars Poetica: Why Write a Poem When Everything Is Lost? - Manuel Iris
Business/ 100 Rejections a Year: A Guide to the Literary Journal Submission Process - Sonia Feldman
Beyond/ Mediums of Liberation - Panel
3:30pm–5:00pm ET
Fiction/ Hello, You: What We Can Learn About Writing From TV - Liz Breazeale & Laura Maylene Walter
Nonfiction/ New Cleveland Journalism - Panel
Poetry/ Wilding the Mind: Disruptive Techniques for Poetic Experimentation - Panel
Business/ An Editor's Advice on Nonfiction Book Proposals - David Gray
Beyond/ Crafting Children's Books That Matter: Through the Lens of a Mother and Publisher - Cori Sykes

7:00pm–8:30pm ET
Keynote - Elizabeth Acevedo

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

BOOK FAIR / 9:00AM–5:00PM ET
The book fair will be open from 10:00am-5:00pm on Friday and 9:00am-5:00pm on Saturday at the conference and will feature local independent booksellers, literary journals, publishers and presses, writing groups, and literary organizations.
 
Participants so far include: Alma College, Appletree Books, Ashland University MFA in Creative Writing, Cleveland READS, Clevo Books, CSU Poetry Center, Cuyahoga County Public Library's William N. Skirball Writers' Center, Fireside Book Shop, Grieveland, ID13 Prison Literacy Project, Loganberry Books, Mac's Backs-Books on Coventry, Ohioana Library Association, Rescue Press, Rust Belt Studies, The Cupboard Pamphlet, ThirdSpace Reading Room, University of Akron Press, Visible Voice Books, Wilks University Graduate Program in Creative Writing, Write and Vibe Publishing, Writers in Residence, and more to come.
GENRE SOCIAL / 9:00AM–5:00PM ET
Looking to meet fellow writers? The Genre Social room will be open from 10:00am-5:00pm on Friday and 9:00am-5:00pm on Saturday. Stop by during or between sessions to mingle and make new friends.
9:00am–10:30am ET
Fiction/ The Invisible Art of Revision - Matt Bell
Nonfiction/ Hot Flashes: Writing Scintillating and Succinct Essays - Lee Chilcote
Poetry/ Writing From the Collective: the “We” Point of View in Poetry - Tiara Dinevska-McGuire
Business/ How to Catch an Editor’s Attention from Page One - Jess Jelsma Masterton
Beyond/ Let’s Thrive: Building Creative Writing Communities - Panel
Teen/ Characters + Chaos + Constraints = Comics - Matt Haberbusch
11:00am–12:30pm ET
Fiction/ Identity in Practice: Cultural and Commercial Considerations in Your Manuscript - Rakesh Satyal
Nonfiction/ What Is a Hermit Crab Essay and How to Write One - Amy Fish
Poetry/ It's A Holiday - Siaara Freeman
Business/ How To (Authentically) Market Your Writing Career - Prince Shakur
Beyond/ Words are Also Migrants - Manuel Iris
Teen/ Drawing Connections: Teen Poetry Workshop - Raja Belle Freeman
1:30pm–3:00pm ET
Fiction/ The Engine of Flash Fiction: Openings, Metaphors, and Characters - Tommy Dean
Nonfiction/ Page Count Live: Literary Magic with Elissa Washuta
Poetry/ Bees, Rocks, Heat, & Garbage: Poetry And The Outside World - Panel
Business/ The Dreaded Query Letter: How to Make Yours Shine - Jacqui Lipton
Beyond/ Superman, the Future of a Legend: A Live Interview with Phillip Kennedy Johnson
Teen/ Collaborative Storytelling - Cynthia Larsen
3:30pm–5:00pm ET
Fiction/ More Than One Way: Writing Fiction in Non-traditional Forms - Nardine Taleb
Nonfiction/ Writing as the Art of Caregiving - Sean Thomas Dougherty
Poetry/ Sestina & Ghazal: Forms that move your emotions - Kisha Nicole Foster
Business/ Writing for Social Change: How Creatives Can Influence and Amplify Justice Movements - Panel
Beyond/ Editing the Region: Publishing, Place, and the Local in Literary-Cultural Production - Panel
Teen/ Microfiction: A Story in 100 Words - Amy Hughes
7:00pm–9:00pm ET
Afterparty Reading

Full
Schedule

18–20

SEP

VIRTUAL
EVENTS

Mon SEP 18 / 7:00PM ET / fiction

Small Moments, Big Problems: On Short Fiction and the Book Industry
What can a single author do to combat the problems facing the publishing world? Join Lydia Davis for a wide-ranging conversation with Danny Caine (How to Resist Amazon and Why) about her distinguished career, the art of short fiction, and her decision to publish her dazzling new book Our Strangers in a way that cuts out Amazon and champions independent bookstores.
 
Danny Caine is the author of the books How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why as well as the poetry collections Continental Breakfast, El Dorado Freddy's, ​Flavortown, and Picture Window. His poetry has appeared in The Slowdown, ​LitHub, DIAGRAM, HAD, and Barrelhouse. He's a co-owner of the Raven Book Store, Publishers Weekly's 2022 bookstore of the year. 
 
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel, seven collections of stories, including Can't and Won't (FSG, 2014), as well as two collections of non-fiction, Essays One (FSG, 2019) and Essays Two (FSG, 2021). She is also an award-winning translator from French and other languages. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2003), the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2013), the Man Booker International Prize (2013) for her fiction, and, in 2020, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. She has been decorated as both Chevalier and Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and translation. Her new collection of short stories, Our Strangers, will be published by Bookshop.org in October 2023. She lives in upstate New York.

Lydia Davis & Danny Caine

Tue SEP 19 / 7:00PM ET / nonfiction

Emerging from Erasure: Self-Making in Memoir
How do we construct a self through stories? How do dominant cultural narratives flatten identities of those on the margins into a single story or erase them altogether? How can memoir offer not only survival but a way to regain power? Memoirists Hafizah Augustus Geter (The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin) and Joseph Earl Thomas (Sink) will discuss how stories can be a site for unlearning internalized narratives such as white supremacy and toxic masculinity as well as a foundation for building beauty and community on your own terms.
 
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, 2022), is a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, a Good Morning America Anticipated Book, an Amazon's Best of the Month Editor's Pick, and was longlisted for a 2023 PEN Open Book Award. She is the author of the poetry collection Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, Boston Review, The Believer, The Paris Review, Salon, The Funambulist, among many others. She is a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories: Leviathan Beach, among other oddities. He is an associate faculty member at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, as well as the Director of Programs at Blue Stoop in Philadelphia.

Hafizah Augustus Geter &
Joseph Earl Thomas

Wed SEP 20 / 7:00PM ET / poetry

The Same Breath: Poems Are in Everything
How can poetry bridge wonder and despair, past and present, ordinary and extraordinary? Clint Smith (Above Ground) and Hanif Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) will discuss poetry as a site for paying attention, pulling forward cultural history, making connections, and finding meaning.
 
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of the poetry collections The Crown Ain't Worth Much (2016) and A Fortune For Your Disaster (2019) and the nonfiction books They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017) and Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest (2019). In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Clint Smith is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground and Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Clint Smith & Hanif Abdurraqib

THURS

SEP 21

THURSDAY, SEP 21
6:00–9:00PM ET

EVENT

Kickoff Mixer and Book Swap
Celebrate the start of our 2023 in-person Inkubator Writing Conference with a free mixer and book swap at Muze Gastropub at Studio West 117 (1384 Hird Ave, Lakewood, OH 44107). Meet fellow writers and bring a book to swap. This is a great chance to re-gift some books you no longer want and pick up some new-to-you reads. Stick around for a special drag show at 8pm with donations going to the Ohio's LGBT news source The Buckeye Flame.

FRI

SEP 22

FRIDAY, SEP 22
11:00AM ET

fiction

Three Sentences to Unlock Your Plot
Let's demystify plot with a writer who has written a lot of them!  We will engage in three quick exercises aimed toward roughing out the shape of your story, it's beginning, middle, and end.  Bring writing materials and a story idea.
Marie Vibbert’s over 90 short stories have appeared in prestigious magazines like Nature and Amazing Stories, been translated into four languages, and won "best of the year" awards, including a Nebula Award nomination and listing by the Hugos and British Science Fiction Awards.

Marie Vibbert

nonfiction

Braided Essays: Other Possibilities,
Other Selves
Braided essays weave multiple narrative threads to form a singular, cohesive piece. Personal narratives are braided with threads involving research, object analysis, social critiques, archival stories, and oral histories. In doing so, braided essays allow for greater narrative possibilities than memory does alone. Braided narratives can rewrite socio-cultural narratives, tell collective stories, show how the personal is political, and make sense of what haunts us. This workshop is suitable for beginner and intermediate writers. Workshop participants will analyze portions of braided essays, learn strategies for identifying, creating, and managing multiple narratives, and receive advice on shaping their braided essay.
Stacy Jane Grover is the author of Tar Hollow Trans: Essays from the University Press of Kentucky. Her essays appear in Salon, Bitch Media, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Cincinnati. She lives in Columbus. 

Stacy Jane Grover

poetry

Even the Least of These: The Ten-Line Poem in the Time of Crisis
The ten-line poem is one that encourages us as writers to pay attention to the small, ordinary things in our everyday experience. It is short, can focus on a single object, idea, or event, and can be drafted in a short amount of time, thus making it the ideal way to respond to the world around us, particularly in a time of crisis.  There is art to this form, and in our workshop we will discuss craft and content and write such ten-line poems.
Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books. She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008). 

ANITA Skeen

business

The Power of Mindset for Your Writing Life
We'll explore the role of author mindset as vital to publishing success. How does a writer keep on the path to publication? We'll spend time exploring new ways to combat what stops us from writing including: procrastination, perfectionism, imposter syndrome and feeling overwhelmed with creative ideas. This workshop draws on the latest neuroscience research on creativity, motivation, attention, habit-stacking and resiliency. Writers will leave with doable action steps and success strategies to implement. For emerging and established writers.
Michele Tracy Berger is a professor, a writer, a creativity coach and a pug-lover. Her short fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction has appeared in a variety of publications including 100 Word Story, Apex Magazine, Glint Literary Journal, FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, and Ms. Her short story collection will be published in spring 2024 by Aunt Lute Books.

Michele Tracy Berger

beyond

Writing Your First Book: Sticking to It
Publishing a first book is a transformational moment in a writer’s career, but it is very difficult to complete a book-length project without support. How do you push through difficulty and self-doubt? How do you weather personal setback without giving up on your manuscript? And what are ways to find the ongoing encouragement and feedback to see a long-term project through to the finish? In this panel, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry participants in the inaugural Literary Cleveland Breakthrough Writing Residency program share the lessons they learned spending a full year on their first books.
Silk Allen is a storyteller and personal stylist from Cleveland, Ohio whose influences range from fashion, history and music to the words of Iceberg Slim and Lil Kim. Silk received a degree in journalism from Central State University and an associate’s in fashion merchandising from Virginia Marti College, and she has written for local publications like BFly Magazine, The Plain Dealer, The Plain Press, and Destination Cleveland. 
 
Rico Brown is an artist and writer living in NE Ohio. He started writing poetry as part of trauma therapy, and it has since become a passion. Rico is currently working on a collection of poems about his life as a queer man of color, trauma survivor, and recovered drug addict living with depression.
 
Sonia Feldman is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in journals like The Missouri Review, The Southern Review and Beloit Poetry Journal. She runs Sonia’s Poem of the Week, an email newsletter sharing one good poem a week plus commentary. 

Andrea Imdacha is a writer and poet of Sri Lankan and Hungarian heritage who hails from Savannah, GA. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Literary Mama and Mash Stories. Her short story “Mohini Baba” was a finalist for North American Review’s 2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize in Speculative Literature and is forthcoming in their Fall 2022 edition. Her novel manuscript, Tiberius, was a semi-finalist for the James Kirkwood Prize in Fiction. Andrea lives in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and son.

Michael Loderstedt is Professor Emeritus of Kent State University where he taught printmaking and photography. His recent manuscript entitled The Yellowhammer’s Cross received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Non-Fiction Literature, and his recent work has been published in Neighborhood Voices, Muleskinner Journal, and the NC Literary Review (receiving the 2021 James Applewhite Prize for Poetry) and was featured in the CAN Triennial. 
 
‍Corey Miller’s writing has appeared in Booth, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He reads for TriQuarterly, Longleaf Review, and Barren Magazine. When Corey isn’t brewing beer for a living in Cleveland, he likes to take the dogs for adventures. 

Silk Allen, Rico Brown,‍ Sonia Feldman, Andrea Imdacha, Michael Loderstedt, ‍& Corey Miller

FRIDAY, SEP 22
1:30PM ET

fiction

Cleveland Noir: Writing Genre 
Meet several authors of the Cleveland Noir anthology for a lively discussion about their twisted tales set in neighborhoods all over Cleveland. Together, they'll explore the inner workings of writing genre fiction and delve into the blurry lines between mystery, tragedy, comedy, and horror. Moderated by Cleveland Noir editor and contributor Miesha Headen.
J.D. Belcher is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. He serves as editor for the online news publication the Yellow Party News and the daily devotional website Ephod and Breastplate. His debut memoir, Hades’ Melody, was long-listed for the 2019 Sante Fe Writers Project literary awards. The Inescapable Consequence, his first novel, was released by Yorkshire Publishing in the spring of 2021.

Angela Crook is the author of three novels: Fat Chance, Chasing Navah, and Maria’s Song. She is a mother from Cleveland who loves writing dark thrillers that often involve the exploration of the inner workings of family relationships.

Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves and Stealing Time. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Antioch Review, and Mississippi Review, and her flash fiction in places like Helen, Berlin Fiction Kitchen, and Tiferet. Currently, she is working on a historical novel set in 1930s Cleveland. 

Miesha Wilson Headen is a writer and bookseller who has been awarded the Best Minority Issues Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, a BINC Bookseller Activist Award, and a CLE AKR Informed Communities Award from the Cleveland Foundation. She is the former mayor of Richmond Heights, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two sons. She graduated from Columbia University and Ursuline College. She is a preacher’s kid.

Susan Petrone is the author of the forthcoming The Swinging Santoros as well as The Heebie-Jeebie Girl, The Super Ladies, Throw Like a Woman, and A Body at Rest. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her writing has appeared in such diverse publications as Glimmer Train, ESPN.com, Belt Magazine, and Whiskey Island. She is also one of the cofounders and former president of Literary Cleveland.

Abby L. Vandiver, also writing as Abby Collette and Cade Bentley, is a hybrid author who has penned more than thirty books and short stories. She has hit both the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best seller lists. Vandiver spends her time writing cozy mysteries and women’s fiction, as well as facilitating writing workshops at local libraries and hanging out with her grandchildren, each of whom are her favorite.

Angela Crook, JD Belcher, Mary Grimm, Miesha Wilson Headen, Susan Petrone, & Abby Vandiver

nonfiction

Writing About That Which We Dare Not Speak
We all have secrets so deep we dread anyone discovering them, yet these are often the very things we need to write about. This workshop will give several concrete ways to write about that which we dare not speak—whether due to trauma or privacy concerns—while remaining safe.
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones (2024), Mama, Mama, Only Mama (2019), Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home (2018), and co-editor of the anthology Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility. Lara is the interviews editor for Hippocampus Magazine and holds an MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Lara Lillibridge

poetry

Writing an Ars Poetica: Why Write a Poem When Everything Is Lost?
An Ars Poetica is a poem about poetry, a meditation on poetry in the form of a poem. They are manifestos of an author’s artistic beliefs. But they go beyond that: In stating the function of poetry, the poet declares the meaning of her own life. This kind of poem utters the terms of a battle against nothingness, against oblivion. Each Ars Poetica answers two questions: What is poetry for? and—more importantly—what is my life for, if I dedicate it to translating silence?

Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Mexican-born American Poet. Writer-in-Residence of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County public library (2023), Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020), and member of the National System of Art Creators or Mexico (SNCA). Winner of the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014). His first bilingual anthology of poems, Traducir el silencio / Translating silence, was published in New York in 2018 and won two different awards in the International Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles, California. In 2022, his book “The parting present/Lo que se irá” won the reader’s Choice Award, in the Ohioana Book Awards. Also in 2022, the Autonomous University of Chiapas, in Mexico, published the book “Translator of silence: critical approaches to the Manuel Iris’ literary works”, which collects essays, reviews, and interviews of 23 different authors about Iris’ poetry.

Manuel Iris

business

100 Rejections a Year: A Guide to the Literary Journal Submission Process
Rejection is quintessential to the writing experience for anyone who hopes to share their work with an audience. It can also be exhausting, demoralizing and an impediment to your progress as an emerging writer. This craft talk approaches the submission process through the lens of rejection—how to manage its emotional toll and set achievable goals. We'll cover pragmatic best practices for submitting to literary journals and celebrate the process of honoring your work through submission, regardless of outcome.
Sonia Feldman is a Literary Cleveland Breakthrough Writing Resident. Her writing has been published in journals like The Missouri Review, The Southern Review and Waxwing. Her debut short story won the 2023 PEN America PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She is at work on her first novel.

Sonia Feldman

beyond

Mediums to Liberation
As bell hook affirms in her book Teaching to Transgress, education is a practice of freedom. Whether you’re teaching or the one being taught, education has the beauty to empower communities to critically analyze and engage systems of power and influence. Mediums to Liberation is a celebratory discussion that examines how different modes of critical pedagogy are essential to community building and resisting white supremacy.
 
Jason Harris is a Black American writer. He currently serves as an editor for Gordon Square Review. He has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Twelve Literary Arts.
 
Avery Ware is a writer and educator in Cleveland, Ohio by way of Lorain. They are the co-host of Drag from the Left (#DragFTL) Podcast. Avery holds their MA in Americana Studies from Youngstown University. Their writing and research covers themes of queer desirability politics and race relations. Avery is one of the founding members of Mx. Juneteenth and they focus on marketing and PR.
 
Willow Watson (she/her, they/them) is your local Black transfemme creative, organizer, and hottie. As a literary artist and creative, Willow is concerned with pedagogy, access, trans and queered Black embodiments, and legibility. Namely, how do Black embodiments find legibility through the literary arts despite the legacy of anti-literacy laws? Alongside their creative pursuits, Willow organizes locally with The Pleasure Gap, People's Budget (PB) Cleveland, and works to create spaces for queer and trans Black people and people of color to connect and build community. 

Jason Harris, Avery Ware, & Willow Watson

FRIDAY, SEP 22
3:30PM ET

fiction

Hello, You: What We Can Learn About Writing from TV
TV. You're familiar; it's that thing we stare at to avoid writing. But, shockingly, we can actually absorb writing lessons from the same medium that brings us The Bachelor. In this session, we'll explore TV from a creative writer's POV, examining the silly (yes, sometimes picking a font IS an all-day task, Bojack Horseman), the useful (how Yellowjackets creates tension via dual timelines), and the downright absurd (is Carrie Bradshaw the worst writer in the world?). We'll discuss shows like Always Sunny, Better Call Saul, YOU, and others to achieve the ultimate dream: becoming a better writer by watching TV.
Liz Breazeale is an NEA 2020 Creative Writing Fellow and author of Extinction Events, winner of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Joyland, Kenyon Review Online, Best of the Net, Cincinnati Review, Fence, Passages North, and others.
 
Laura Maylene Walter is author of the novel Body of Stars. Her writing has received support from Sewanee, Yaddo, Tin House, Ohio Arts Council, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and elsewhere. She is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.

Liz Breazeale & Laura Maylene Walter

nonfiction

New Cleveland Journalism
In the last three years, the local journalism landscape in Cleveland has undergone a major shift. The loss of Plain Dealer union jobs and birth of new projects including The Land, The Buckeye Flame, Signal Cleveland and Cleveland Documenters, Axios Cleveland, The Marshall Project Cleveland and more have reinvented how news is reported, framed, and distributed locally. How is this new news ecosystem functioning? What are the benefits and drawbacks to alternative models? And what can local writers learn about journalism jobs, freelance writing, and telling the stories of our city?

Sam Allard is a reporter for Axios Cleveland. He was previously a staff writer at the alternative weekly, Cleveland Scene, and taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Cleveland State. He lives on Cleveland's near west side.

Stephanie Casanova is the criminal justice and community safety reporter for Signal Cleveland. She covered criminal justice and breaking news at the Chicago Tribune and is a bilingual journalist with a passion for storytelling that is inclusive and reflects the diversity of the communities she covers. Stephanie has been a reporter and copy editor for local newspapers in South Dakota, Kansas and Arizona. She is also a Maynard 200 alumni, a Maynard Institute for Journalism Education training program for journalists of color that focuses on making newsrooms more equitable, diverse and anti-racist.

Sharon Holbrook is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Cleveland Magazine, Preservation, Belt, and many other national and local publications. She is also published in the anthologies A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City and So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood. Prior to becoming managing editor of The Land, Sharon was the managing editor of local media company Your Teen. She lives in Shaker Heights with her family.

Ken Schneck is the Editor of The Buckeye Flame, Ohio’s only statewide LGBTQ+ news and views platform. He is the author of Seriously…What Am I Doing Here? The Adventures of a Wondering and Wandering Gay Jew (2017), LGBTQ Cleveland (2018), LGBTQ Columbus (2019) and LGBTQ Cincinnati (2020). In his spare time, he is a professor of education at Baldwin Wallace University.

Sam Allard, Stephanie Casanova, Sharon Holbrook, & Ken Schneck

poetry

Wilding the Mind: Disruptive Techniques for Poetic Experimentation
In this poetry talk and workshop we’ll explore strategies for interrupting thought-based line-forming poesis in order to cultivate a sustainable agroforest of the mind. We’ll explore language-generating techniques that employ sound games, word association/dissociation, and temporal practices that forefront bodily and non-thinking procedures poets can use to escape routines, break out of creative slumps, and take their work to strange and exciting places.
 
Jon Conley is a writer and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. His poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Dream Pop, Annulet, Bullshit Lit, X-R-A-Y, HelloHorror, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA and his chapbook House Hunters International :: Sonnets is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press in 2023.
 
Zach Peckham is a writer, editor, and educator. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in jubilat, Territory, Poetry Northwest, Always Crashing, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA and teaches at Cleveland State and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is the managing editor at the CSU Poetry Center and editor-in-chief of the Cleveland Review of Books.
 
Alyssa Perry's writing appears in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, The Canary, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. Perry is an editor at Rescue Press and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Jon Conley, Zach Peckham, & Alyssa Perry

business

An Editor’s Advice on Nonfiction Book Proposals
How can you make your nonfiction book proposal more attractive to publishers? We'll start with a few essential elements of the book publishing business (because for publishers, business comes first!). Then, we'll talk about shaping your book idea so it appeals to acquiring editors. Next, crafting and making your pitch. Finally, targeting the right publisher. Much of the session is devoted to answering your specific, real-world questions.
 
David Gray is president of Gray & Company, an independent publisher of regional nonfiction books since 1991: www.grayco.com

David Gray

beyond

Crafting Children's Books That Matter: Through the Lens of a Mother and Publisher
Our future lies in the hands of our youth. That's right, the children addicted to TikTok and video games are the same ones that will run the world. Using your gift as a children's book writer, you can be the voice that guides and teaches them to make a positive impact. Attendees will learn valuable insights that include how to find and work with illustrators, how to choose the appropriate age group and craft a strong elevator pitch, and how to use your story to deliver an uplifting message. The future is strong and stories can be too.
Cori Sykes is an award-winning multi-genre author and the dreamer behind Write and Vibe Publishing. She has curated classes through the Cleveland Public Library and Write and Vibe that were taught by bestselling authors and local subject matter experts. Her favorite thing to do is make literary magic.

Cori Sykes

FRIDAY, SEP 22
5:00–7:00PM ET

EVENT

Friday Dinner Mixer
Join us at the downtown Cleveland Public Library outdoor reading garden for a special $25 dinner mixer and performance after the Friday conference sessions and before Elizabeth Acevedo's keynote. Eat, drink, meet fellow writers, and enjoy a one-time-only performance. Alice Blumenfeld, artistic director of Abrepaso Flamenco, will perform "Labyrinths," a site-specific deconstructed flamenco dance inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges. Blumenfeld will lead audience members from the outdoor garden through the labyrinth of the library to "The Archive," an immersive art installation by world-renowned artist Rebecca Louise Law on display at the library. This special event invites you to experience dance and libraries in a new dimension. Get your dinner ticket here.

FRIDAY, SEP 22
7:00PM ET

keynote

Elizabeth Acevedo
Keynote speaker Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, as well as the books With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land. Her newest book, Family Lore, is the story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives. In this keynote talk, Elizabeth Acevedo will read from her new novel, speak to writing and community, and answer audience questions. This event is presented by the Cleveland Public Library.
 
Elizabeth Acevedo is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Poet X, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Pura Belpré Award, the Carnegie medal, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and the Walter Award. She is also the author of numerous other titles including Family Lore; With the Fire on High, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library, NPR, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal; and Clap When You Land, a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor book and a Kirkus finalist. Acevedo has been a fellow of Cave Canem, Cantomundo, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshops. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and resides in Washington, DC with her husband.

SAT

SEP 23

SATURDAY, SEP 23
9:00AM ET

fiction

The Invisible Art of Revision
Writers from Ernest Hemingway (“The only kind of writing is rewriting”) to Khaled Hosseini (“Writing for me is largely about rewriting”) to Joyce Carol Oates (“Most of my time writing is really re-writing”) have stressed the importance of revision. And yet, since all we usually have access to is the final draft of a published book or story, revision is something of an invisible art. In this session we’ll try to draw it into the light, with examples from life, literature and even pop culture, and offer some strategies for how to re-see re-vision.
 
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book of 2021) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. His is also the author of Scrapper (a Michigan Notable Book), and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods (a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, Gulf Coast, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Matt Bell

nonfiction

Hot Flashes: Writing Scintillating and Succinct Essays
Flash prose, or stories that are typically between 500-1,000 words, have become an increasingly popular genre in recent years. Now, essayists have gotten in on the game. Like flash fiction, flash nonfiction has the advantage of generating a significant amount of heat and action in a relatively short space. This workshop will explore some of the best flash nonfiction out there, craft techniques for writing great short essays, and resources for learning more. We'll do a writing exercise, share our work, and take ideas home with us.
Lee Chilcote is an award-winning journalist, writer and author whose writing is published in The Washington Post, Associated Press, National Public Radio, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Vanity Fair, Next City, Belt and many literary journals as well as in The Cleveland Neighborhood Guidebook, The Cleveland Anthology and A Race Anthology: Dispatches and Artifacts from a Segregated City. His poetry chapbooks are The Shape of Home and How to Live in Ruins. He is founder and editor of The Land, a local news startup reporting on Cleveland's neighborhoods, and a founder and past executive director of Literary Cleveland. He lives in the Detroit Shoreway neighborhood of Cleveland with his family.

Lee Chilcote

poetry

Writing From the Collective: the “We” Point of View in Poetry 
Poets sometimes take on the role of speaker for more than just themselves – literally. How do we speak for a collective in poems penned by just one voice? What does it mean to speak for the whole, be it a community, culture, or movement? In this class, we will attempt to find synchronicity between ourselves as individuals and as members of our surroundings, circumstances, and histories.
 
Tiara Dinevska-McGuire is a first-generation Macedonian-American poet and translator from Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry can be read in Poet Lore, The Common, Cagibi, and elsewhere. In 2022 she received her MFA from Boston University, where she also was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship and served as a Teaching Fellow. Currently, she is focused on further developing her abilities as a translator from Macedonian to English.

Tiara Dinevska-McGuire  

business

How to Catch an Editor’s Attention from Page One
Submissions to small presses and literary magazines are at an all-time high. With so much competition, how do you make sure your manuscript is in the best position to catch an editor’s attention? In this session, we’ll discuss the importance of various craft, editing, and formatting decisions. We’ll review five of Ann Hood’s suggested methods for beginning a novel, short story, or essay. Then, we’ll explore the importance of proofreading and the best practices for selecting fonts and formatting headings, titles, and file names.
 
Jess Jelsma Masterton is a writer, editor, and educator. She is an assistant professor of publishing and media entrepreneurship at Susquehanna University, where she teaches courses between the English Department and the Sigmund Weis School of Business. She also serves as the director of SU Press, an undergraduate-run publisher that operates as a small business. She was previously the editor and managing director of Ruminate Magazine, and has also held editorial positions at The Cincinnati Review and Black Warrior Review. Her writing has been published in venues such as Catapult, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, and Quarterly West. In fall 2023, she will take over as the national director of FUSE, the Forum for Undergraduate Student Editors.

Jess Jelsma Masterton

beyond

Let’s Thrive: Building Creative Writing Communities
Writing can be lonely, but it doesn't have to be! Panelists Jason Harris, Laurie Kincer, Dr. Raquel M. Ortiz and Jamie Lyn Smith provide strategies for writers, artists, educators and community organizers seeking to build and sustain intentionally diverse, welcoming creative writing communities for writers of all ages and abilities. Whether you prefer to gather on or offline, connect with peer professionals, or partner with public libraries, community centers, and bookstores, join us for ideas to forge connections that foster meaningful professional collaborations, friendships, and feedback.
Jason Harris is a Black American writer. He currently serves as an editor for Gordon Square Review. He has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Twelve Literary Arts.
 
Laurie Kincer is a librarian who runs Cuyahoga County Public Library's  William N. Skirball Writers' Center, located in the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch. The Writers' Center is a space for writers, open to the public during library hours, with free writing programs, private writing rooms, books and magazines for writers to borrow, and laptop computers.

Dr. Raquel M. Ortiz, an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, is a social anthropologist, educator, storyteller, playwright, performer, poet, composer, editor, illustrator, and author of an academic book, articles, children's books and songs. In April Dr. Ortiz released an album of Afro-Puerto Rican bomba songs for children, Que vengan los niños. She is the 2023 Cleveland Public Library Artist in Residence.

Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer and editor. A founding member of BreakBread Literacy Project, Editor-at-Large at BreakBread Magazine and a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review, she is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. Her short story collection, Township, debuted from Cornerstone Press in 2022.

Jason Harris, Laurie Kincer, Dr. Raquel M. Ortiz, & Jamie Lyn Smith

TEEN

Characters + Chaos + Constraints = Comics
Make a one page comic using figurines and trading cards for our characters, plus randomized prompts, plus a couple of timed exercises. Brining your own beloved figurines or trading cards is optional.
Matt Haberbusch is an indie/alternative comics maker in Cleveland. He enjoys the nervous creative energy of timed group drawing exercises and has co-organized a public local comics making group for adults, Comics in the Circle. He has made comics for Cleveland Scene, Vagabond Comics, CWRU's The Observer, and he has exhibited self published work at Genghis Con. He also loves writing, drawing, and making personal comics in his trusty composition notebook, a practice he has learned from Lynda Barry and would recommend to anyone.

Matt Haberbusch

SATURDAY, SEP 23
11:00AM ET

fiction

Identity in Practice: Cultural and Commercial Considerations in Your Manuscript
In this workshop, we'll explore what it means to capture your identity and culture in your writing. How do you decide what to explain or conceal? Who is your reader? And above all, how do you keep yourself entertained, so that you might attain the highest level of enjoyment when working? Incorporating issues of style and real-world discussions about the commercial market and publishing, this workshop will help you focus your POV as a writer while keeping in mind your audience and your overall career.
 
Rakesh Satyal is the author of the novels Blue Boy and No One Can Pronounce My Name. He is currently an Executive Editor at the HarperOne Group/HarperCollins. He is also a cabaret performer and speaks often on the topics of writing and publishing. He lives with his husband in Brooklyn.

Rakesh Satyal

nonfiction

What Is a Hermit Crab Essay and How do I Write One?
A hermit crab essay is an essay in an alternate form—like a story told through letters or emails. More creative approaches might include a book review in prayer form or a memoir told through medical reports or classroom notes. This workshop will review examples of hermit crab essays and then offer tips for creating your own. Participants will have the opportunity to experiment with form and will come away with the tools for their own hermit crab essay.
Amy Fish is the author of I Wanted Fries with That: How to Ask for What You Want and Get What You Need (New World Library 2019). Her work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, Costco Connection and Canadian Traveller. She is on the staff of Hippocampus Magazine for Creative Nonfiction.

Amy Fish

poetry

It's a Holiday
In this workshop writers will create new holidays to celebrate the things they love or memorialize what they have lost, and maybe both in the same poem. This workshop is discussion based, collaborative and exploratory. Writers will be guided first in the creation of the holiday and then will be offered two writing prompts. Writers will be encouraged to share and offer/receive feedback.
 
Siaara Freeman is from Cleveland Ohio, where she is the current Lake Erie Siren. She is a 2023 Room in the House fellow with Karmau Theater,  a 2022 Catapult fellow with Cleveland Public Theater. In 2021 Siaara filmed a commercial for the Cleveland Museum of Art & participated with #TeamYellowBrickRoad for the Black Joy Experience.  She is a 2021 Premier Playwright fellow recipient with Cleveland Public theater. She is a 2020 WateringHole Manuscript fellow, 2018 Poetry Foundation incubator fellow and a four time nominee for the pushcart prize. Her work appears in The Journal,  Josephine Quarterly, Cleveland Magazine and elsewhere. She has had multiple poems go viral and has toured both nationally and internationally. Siaara is the Curriculum Development Manager at the Center of Arts Inspired Learning, and the artistic director for Artworks. She is the current poet laureate of Cleveland Heights and University Heights. When she is not working she is likely by a lake, thinking of Toni Morrison & talking to ghosts. Her first full length manuscript Urbanshee is available with Button Poetry.

Siaara Freeman

business

How to (Authentically) Market Your Writing Career
As individuals who have entered the writing industry on the fringes, it is crucial to address how artists can construct effective narratives surrounding our careers and practices, which ultimately translates into "self-marketing." This informative discussion by Prince Shakur will examine numerous approaches that writers can employ to genuinely discuss and promote their work on digital platforms. Whether it entails identifying suitable themes for essay and article proposals, enhancing the ease of residency applications, generating content for newsletters or videos pertaining to the writing life, or developing attractiveness to literary agents, participants will depart with a comprehensive set of resources enabling them to effectively market themselves in an authentic manner.
Prince Shakur is a Jamaican-American author, journalist, podcast host,  video maker, and educator. His writings have appeared in Teen Vogue, Afropunk, Catapult, Vice, and more on queer culture, film, and the inner lives of black icons. His media work has been recognized by GLAAD and Society for Features Journalism. His debut memoir, When They Tell You To Be Good, has been described as "a searing account of self-discovery in the face of structural oppression" by Publishers Weekly and is a TIME Magazine's Most Anticipated Book of Fall and Best Book of October. Shakur has attended residencies with Sangam House, Studios of Key West, Norton Island, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and La Madison Baldwin.

Prince Shakur

beyond

Words Are Also Migrants: On Poetry, Life, and Translation
This talk and poetry reading is designed to discuss the link between writing, translation, and migrant life. Every poet is an existential migrant, and explorer of human experience, and every poem carries a revelation, an epiphany. Defining poetry is as hard as defining the human nature. The poet's work is to say with words what is impossible to say with words. The most important part of this talk is the conversation with the audience, in which the community shares their experiences with poetry, migration, life, and beauty.

Manuel Iris (Mexico, 1983). Mexican-born American Poet. Writer-in-Residence of the Cincinnati and Hamilton County public library (2023), Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio (2018-2020), and member of the National System of Art Creators or Mexico (SNCA). Winner of the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014). His first bilingual anthology of poems, Traducir el silencio / Translating silence, was published in New York in 2018 and won two different awards in the International Latino Book Awards in Los Angeles, California. In 2022, his book “The parting present/Lo que se irá” won the reader’s Choice Award, in the Ohioana Book Awards. Also in 2022, the Autonomous University of Chiapas, in Mexico, published the book “Translator of silence: critical approaches to the Manuel Iris’ literary works”, which collects essays, reviews, and interviews of 23 different authors about Iris’ poetry.

Manuel Iris

TEEN

Drawing Connections: Teen Poetry Workshop
Have you ever wanted to explain something in your writing but you had trouble putting it into words? This will be a workshop focused on how to use extended metaphors to make topics and ideas that are difficult to explain easier to digest for the reader by connecting them to something simple and common.
Raja Belle Freeman, a performance poet and visual artist, is a teaching artist for Lake Erie Ink and a member of the board of South Euclid's community development corporation, One South Euclid. She is also a recent graduate of Cleveland State University where she received a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Black Studies. In recent years, she has been featured on WKYC-TV News for video poems on social injustice. Find that video and others from Twelve Literary Arts and Michelle R. Smith's BLAX Museum on YouTube.

Raja Belle Freeman

SATURDAY, SEP 23
1:30PM ET

fiction

The Engine of Flash Fiction: Openings, Metaphors, and Characters
Join Tommy Dean for a 1.5 hour generative writing session focused on The Engine of Flash Fiction: Openings, Metaphors, and Characters. Make dreading the blank page a thing of the past! We'll look at model texts and hopefully get inspired by the writing prompts! Past students have published stories inspired by my prompts in today's best flash fiction literary magazines. Will you join them?
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019, 2022, and elsewhere. He's on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

Tommy Dean

nonfiction

Page Count Live: Literary Magic with Elissa Washuta
Attend a live podcast recording as host Laura Maylene Walter interviews Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic, a collection of intertwined essays focusing on land, heartbreak, colonization, the occult, Native spirituality, and more. This interview will surround the craft of essay writing, themes in White Magic, Washuta’s publication journey, and perhaps even some wisdom from the tarot. Audience members will have a chance to ask questions during this session, which will later air as an episode of Page Count, a literary podcast presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library.
Laura Maylene Walter is the author of the novel Body of Stars (Dutton, 2021), an Ohioana Book Awards Finalist and a UK Booksellers Association Fiction Book of the Month selection. She has received grants, fellowships, or residencies from Sewanee, Yaddo, Tin House, the Ohio Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Chautauqua Institution, the Ohioana Library Association, and Art Omi: Writers. She is the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow at Cleveland Public Library, where she hosts Page Count, a literary podcast.
 
Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Laura Walter & Elissa Washuta

poetry

Bees, Rocks, Heat, & Garbage: Poetry and the Outside World
How can poetry account for the material, daily, or commonplace conditions of the environment in which one lives? How might poetry tether specific ecological conditions or observations to larger questions of choice, worry, weather, community, conservation, extinction, or the nonhuman? This panel will consider what forms and strategies—ode, mess, palimpsest, instruction, somatic, en plein air, fragment, etc.—might serve as useful tools for poets desiring to write about the particulars of place and environmental transformation. We’ll leave you with a list of recommended reading and strategies for composing embodied or in-the-world poems of your own.
 
Jason Harris is a Black American writer. He currently serves as an editor for Gordon Square Review. He has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Twelve Literary Arts.

Caryl Pagel’s most recent books include Free Clean Fill Dirt (poetry) and Out Of Nowhere Into Nothing (essays). She’s a co-founder of Rescue Press and directs the CSU Poetry Center.
 
Zach Savich is the author of six books of poetry, including Daybed, and two books of prose, including Diving Makes the Water Deep. He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

Robin Beth Schaer is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collection Shipbreaking. She teaches writing in Ohio, and she worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a 180-foot ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.
 
Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collections The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include books by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Anne Dufourmantelle, Stéphane Bouquet, Frédéric Neyrat, Richard Rechtman, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and others. Originally from northeast Tennessee, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University.

Jason Harris, Caryl Pagel, Zach Savich, Robin Beth Schaer, & Lindsay Turner

business

The Dreaded Query Letter: How to Make Yours Shine!
You’ve written and revised your manuscript and it’s ready to go... so what’s next? The dreaded query letter of course! In this session Jacqui Lipton, Senior Literary Agent at The Tobias Literary Agency, will explain the role of the query letter on your path to publication and share some of the “dos” and “don’ts” of the process, including how to write in a professional and engaging voice, what information to include (and what to omit), and how to approach an agent or editor you’ve never met. She’ll share some common missteps agents and editors often see in queries, and give examples of queries that really work. She will also share resources to help you find agents/editors and polish your query.
Jacqui Lipton is a senior literary agent and publishing attorney who holds an MFA in fiction writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as a Ph.D. in intellectual property law from Cambridge University. She is the author of Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook for Writers (UC Press, 2020).

Jacqui Lipton

beyond

Superman, the Future of a Legend: A Live Interview with Phillip Kennedy Johnson
With the publication of Action Comics #1, two Clevelanders, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced Superman to the world. Eighty-five years and thousands of issues later, Superman remains one of Cleveland’s most recognizable exports. As we honor the legacy of Superman and our city, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, the current author of Action Comics will speak in our hero's hometown about writing a character with such an extensive archive as he imagines his future.
 
This program is part of “Superman’s Cleveland: Lineage and Legacy” organized by the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College and the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This program is made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of Ohio Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Phillip Kennedy Johnson is an Eisner-nominated writer and musician living in the Washington, DC/Baltimore region. Best known for his work on Superman, Action Comics, Green Lantern, Alien, Marvel Zombies: Resurrection, and 007, his comics work has been published by DC, Marvel, BOOM! Studios, Dynamite, Archaia, IDW, Aftershock, and Scout Comics. He is the creator of comic series The Fellspyre Chronicles from DC Black Label, Last Sons of America, Warlords of Appalachia, Smoketown, and more.

Phillip Kennedy Johnson

TEEN

Collaborative Storytelling
Collaborative storytelling will take your narrative places you didn't know you wanted it to go and get you out of ruts. Also, it's a lot of fun! This workshop is for teens and those who work with teens and want to learn how to play with writing together.
 
Cynthia Larsen is Lake Erie Ink’s co-founder and Education Director. Cynthia taught secondary English in Jersey City, New Jersey; Oakland, California; and Cleveland, Ohio before attending graduate school at the University of Arizona, where she received her MFA in creative writing. Ms. Larsen has facilitated project-based creative writing in collaboration with teachers for over fifteen years, combining her experience in education with her passion for and knowledge of the craft of creative writing.

Cynthia Larsen

SATURDAY, SEP 23
3:30PM ET

fiction

More Than One Way: Writing Fiction in Non-traditional Forms
The story arc (rising, peak, and falling action) has been the most used form in the Western world. Based on the book, Meander, Spiral, Explore by Jane Alison, this workshop explores other ways of narrating fiction that could effectively tell our stories. We will be looking at other story forms and patterns, reading examples, and spending time experimenting with these forms ourselves. As writers we're always looking for the best way to communicate an emotion and moments of life. Maybe there's a better way to capture what we're trying to say and leave our readers with a feeling they'll remember forever.
Nardine Taleb is a speech therapist and writer based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is the author of "warda", a poetry chapbook published by Passengers Press. She is fiction editor of Gordon Square Review, and her favorite thing about Cleveland is the people she meets.

Nardine Taleb

nonfiction

Writing as the Art of Caregiving
This workshop/lecture will explore a conception of writing as the act of caregiving.  What is the difference between caring for vulnerable populations and the art of writing?  What if we think of writing as an extension of what we bring to the world to help others?  In this workshop Sean Thomas Dougherty, a state certified Med Tech and caregiver, will share and expand on his ideas of what this means to us as people and writers, and lead the participants to reflect on their own experience, and how to write about the things and people we’ve nurtured and loved.  Or did we?  What about caring for those who have hurt us?  How do we approach that? Or the things we have lost in the world? 
Sean Thomas Dougherty was born in New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn NY, Toledo, Ohio and Manchester, New Hampshire. He comes from a diverse family with an African American stepfather and a mother of mixed Ashkenazi Jewish descent. He is the author or editor of twenty books including his latest Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His numerous awards also include The Paterson Poetry Prize, The James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, an Established Artist Fellowship for Northwest Pennsylvania, two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and a United States Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. Sean currently works as a writing mentor with the MFA program in creative writing at Western Connecticut State University, and as a Medical Technician and long-term caregiver for folks with traumatic brain injuries. He was the seventh official poet laureate of Erie County, Pennsylvania.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

poetry

Sestinas and Ghazals: Forms that Move your Emotions
This session will explore the poetics forms of a Sestina and the Ghazal. Foster will show how these forms and their intricate techniques force the poet to not only stick to the form, yet move their emotions with repetition and proper end words. By the end of this session, the poet/writer should be confident in creating their own form poems, confident in knowing how to pick proper end words, and feel comfortable in sharing these works with the world!
Kisha Nicole Foster lives in the metropolis of Cleveland, and is the recipient of the 2019 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artist in Literature. Foster is an alumnus of Cleveland State University-BA English. She currently is in the MFA-Poetry program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where this semester she is interning with Red Hen Press. Foster is the author of Poems: 1999-2014 and Bloodwork. Her work has appeared in Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, and she is the runner up for Helen W. Kenefick Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her spoken word album BLK Earth: SPK Poems can be found on Bandcamp. She is the mother of Love, her five year old.

Kisha Nicole Foster

business

Writing for Social Change: How Creatives Can Influence and Amplify Justice Movements
Join writers Ajah Hales, Nailah Muhammad, Eris Eady and Josiah Quarles for a panel discussion on the challenges and triumphs of writing through a lens of activism and the critical role creatives play in social revolution.
  
Eris Eady is a Black, Bisexual, Non-binary & Disabled artist and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. They have performed, presented, and curated healing spaces all over the country. Eris has worked in the nonprofit and advocacy sector for over 20 years and has a Master’s of Science in Positive Organizational Development & Change from Case Western Reserve University.

Ajah Hales (she/her) is a Black, queer, cisgender, able-bodied femme from East Cleveland, Ohio. Her value-driven work is informed by her multi-disciplinary background in community, political, and union organizing, nonprofit administration, and grant, content, copy, screen, and creative writing. When her mother asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Ajah replied: "a dictator." You can find Ajah on Twitter @Ajahswrite.

Nailah Muhammad aka Vision is a daughter, mother, sister, and friend. She is also a Spoken word artist, published author and playwright. She currently works in Maternal and Infant Health as a Program Coordinator and Community Health Worker with Neighborhood Leadership Institute Healthy Communities. She is a member of the OAPN the Ohio Arts Professionals Network recently showcasing at Playhouse Square, The Maltz Auditorium and Severance Hall. Her works have been featured in various publications such as Neighborhood Voices presented by Literary Cleveland. She has also recently completed her book With Vision A Collection of Poetry for Women Who Desire to Be Seen. 

Josiah Quarles is NEOCH’S Director of Organizing and Advocacy. Josiah has a background in grassroots organizing, public speaking, education, sport-based youth development, and multimedia arts. Social Justice and the liberation struggle have been at the heart of many of his professional and artistic endeavors. He views two-way education, community-based solutions, and decentralized power building as fundamentally essential to challenging the politics and policies that have codified the oppression and disenfranchisement of so many.

Eris Eady, Ajah Hales, Nailah Muhammad, & Josiah Quarles

beyond

Editing the Region: Publishing, Place, and the Local in Literary-Cultural Production
Join local editors of regional and national publications and presses—Zach Peckham (Editor-in-Chief, Cleveland Review of Books; Managing Editor, CSU Poetry Center), Jason Harris (Editor-in-Chief, Gordon Square Review), Mitch James (Editor-in-Chief, Great Lakes Review), and Mary Biddinger (Poetry Editor, University of Akron Press)—for a roundtable discussion of contemporary issues in publishing and how they affect the current literary climate of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. Learn how these editors think about place in their work across literary journals and small presses, in print and online, in creative and critical modes, and how they imagine the region’s future(s) alongside Rust Belt political-aesthetics, non-coastal cultural production, the notion of the hyperlocal, and the responsibility of tending to local literary ecology. Moderated by Jacob Bruggeman (Editor-at-Large, Cleveland Review of Books).
 
Mary Biddinger is poetry and poetics editor for the University of Akron Press. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Always Crashing, DIAGRAM, Diode, and Southern Indiana Review. Biddinger’s most recent books are Partial Genius: Prose Poems and Department of Elegy, both with Black Lawrence Press.

Jacob Bruggeman is a Ph.D. student in history at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history and the American Midwest. In addition, he’s the editor-in-chief of the Cleveland Review of Books. His popular writing has appeared in newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Times, Detroit News, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Columbus Dispatch, in magazines like BELT Magazine, The New Territory, University Bookman, and Wreck Park. His recent academic work is forthcoming in Kansas History and the Middle West Review, and two edited collections, one with Kent State University Press and one with the University of Oklahoma Press.

Jason Harris is a Black American writer. He currently serves as an editor for Gordon Square Review. He has received fellowships from The Watering Hole and Twelve Literary Arts.

Mitch James is a Professor of Composition and Literature at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland, OH, where he teaches fiction writing and uses writing-about-writing and writing-to-learn pedagogies to teach first-year and developmental writing. He’s also the Managing Editor at Great Lakes Review. His latest novel Seldom Seen was released with Sunbury Press in 2022, and you can find his latest short fiction in Made of Rust and Glass: Midwest Literary Fiction Vol. 2, Red Branch Review, and Bull, poetry at Watershed Journal, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio's Appalachian Voices, and Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and scholarship at Journal of Creative Writing Studies.
 
Zach Peckham is a writer, editor, and educator. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in jubilat, Territory, Poetry Northwest, Always Crashing, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA and teaches at Cleveland State and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He is the managing editor at the CSU Poetry Center and editor-in-chief of the Cleveland Review of Books.

Mary Biddinger, Jacob Bruggeman, Jason Harris, Mitch James, & Zach Peckham

TEEN

Microfiction: A Story in 100 Words
This workshop will challenge teen writers to tell a story in its shortest form. We will examine sample stories to understand how they work, then write our own 100-word stories inspired by randomly selected prompts (with plenty of space to modify the prompts or try your own ideas). Writers will hone their storytelling skills as they practice selecting vivid details, using precise language, and sharpening sentence structure to get the most mileage out of just 100 words.
Amy Hughes is a writer from Northeast Ohio who has taught writing for more than ten years. She is a teaching artist with Lake Erie Ink, as well as a scuba diver, amateur potter, chronic procrastinator, baker of pies, and thrifter of vintage junk.

Amy Hughes

SATURDAY, SEP 23
7:00PM ET

reading

Afterparty Reading
Mingle with fellow writers and hear readings from Inkubator presenters at the official Inkubator Afterparty Reading, kicking off at 7pm at Worthington Yards in downtown Cleveland. See a stellar lineup of readers including Sean Thomas Dougherty, Siaara Freeman, Manuel Iris, Kevin Latimer, Rakesh Satyal, Zach Savich, Robin Beth Schaer, and Elissa Washuta. The evening will also feature book sales by Visible Voice, on-site screen printing by Zygote Press, and vintage vinyl tunes by Dollar Country. Registration is required as space is limited. Select the Afterparty Reading Ticket on eventbrite to join us.

Sean Thomas Dougherty, Siaara Freeman, Manuel Iris, Kevin Latimer, Rakesh Satyal, Zach Savich, Robin Beth Schaer, & Elissa Washuta 

Community
Projects

SEP 1–30

SUN, SEP 10

Poetry Ride Out
Presented by Ali Black and Balance Point Studios
The Poetry Ride Out is a one-day event designed to merge the love of poetry and bike riding. Participants will bike to three murals by artist Donald Black, Jr. on the southeast side of Cleveland to spend time discussing and writing about Black's murals. The ride begins at Shaker Heights Public Library (Main) at 9:30am, and participants will bike to the three murals, writing about each image and sharing their writing with the group, and returning to Shaker Heights Public Library at 12:00pm. This project promotes skills and bike safety, poetry, community building and overall healthy living.

SUN, SEP 24

Framing the Future: Comics Making in the Rust Belt at the West Side Market
Presented by Rust Belt Humanities Lab
Chad Bilyeu, author of Chad in Amsterdam, will lead a comics-making workshop at the historic West Side Market. This workshop will invite participants to tell personal stories about their city and the spaces they inhabit. The structure of the workshop will allow participants that are both looking to hone their comics-making skills and those who want to drop in while shopping at the market. The city will of Cleveland and spaces like the West Side Market will inspire our work as we think about the ways that comics document space.

SEP 1–30

Coaster Stories
Presented by Loganberry Books
Short poems by past and present regional authors will be printed on cardboard coasters for free distribution to area bars and restaurants.

Funders

The Literary Cleveland Inkubator Writing Conference is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cleveland Foundation, the Cyrus Eaton Foundation, the Nord Family Foundation, and the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Sponsors

The Literary Cleveland Inkubator Writing Conference is sponsored by The Cleveland Public Library. Our Gold Sponsor is Visible Voice Books. Silver Sponsors include Ashland University, Loganberry Books, Mac’s Backs Books and KeyBank, and Bronze Sponsors include Alma College, Appletree Books, Clevo Books, Debbie George State Farm Agent, Fireside Book Shop, Hathaway Brown, Margaret W. Wong and Associates, OverDrive, and Wilks University Graduate College in Creative Writing.

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