​Pitt-Greensburg’s Virtual Written/Spoken Celebrates Student Award Winners and Faculty Authors

Montage of writersNeed something to celebrate?

Come celebrate the joy of writing with The Pitt-Greensburg Written/Spoken Series next Wednesday as it launches the first online reading for the 2020-2021 season.

On Wednesday, October 28, at 7:30 p.m. on Zoom, Written/Spoken will feature the winners of the University's 2020 Creative & Professional Writing Awards:

Madison Jarnot (The Joan Didion Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction); Matthew Boyer (The Scott Turow Award for Excellence in Fiction); and Colin Cavada (The Gerald Stern Prize for Excellence in Poetry).

Kaylee Stinebiser, the winner of the Ida B. Wells Prize for Excellence in Journalism, will read at a later date due to a scheduling conflict.

Joining our award winners will be faculty authors Brittany Hailer and Lori Jakiela.

The event is free, but pre-registration is required.

About Our Featured Authors

Madison Jarnot is a junior Creative and Professional Writing and Political Science dual major. She writes poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and reportage, but spends most of her time eating, sleeping, breathing, and editing news. She received the 2019 Ida B. Wells Award as a freshman for her coverage of Pitt's unionization efforts. She is the first freshman in Pitt-Greensburg history to receive this award. In spring 2020, she went on to win the Joan Didion Award for her creative nonfiction. Currently, she serves as the editor-in-chief of Pitt-Greensburg's campus newspaper, The Insider, and president and secretary of the Political Science honor society, Pi Sigma Alpha.

Matt Boyer is a writer from western Pa. He is an alumnus of the Pitt-Greensburg Creative and Professional Writing Program. He is currently pursuing his graduate degree in creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Chatham University. His work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fleas on the Dog, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere.

Colin Cavada is a Creative and Professional Writing major and editor of Pitt-Greensburg's literary magazine, Pendulum. He is an avid book reviewer on Goodreads and elsewhere. His writing appears in Medium, The Insider, Pendulum, and more.

Brittany Hailer is an award-winning journalist based in Pittsburgh. Her memoir and poetry collection Animal You'll Surely Become was published by Tolsun Books in 2018. Brittany has taught creative writing classes at the Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House as part of Chatham’s Words Without Walls program and now teaches creative writing and journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a contributing writer with the Pittsburgh Current. Her work has appeared in NPR, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

Lori Jakiela is the author of five books, most recently Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe (Autumn House Press, 2019), which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and more. She directs the Creative & Professional Writing program at Pitt-Greensburg, where she is a professor teaching courses in creative nonfiction, journalism, and writing and healing arts.

About the Series

Written/Spoken is a reading series that brings nationally known poets and writers to the Pitt-Greensburg campus. Undergraduate student writers participate in readings and give performances of their own work. The series is sponsored by Pitt-Greensburg’s Creative & Professional Writing Program and the Office of Academic Affairs. For more information, please contact Lori Jakiela at loj@pitt.edu.

Publication Date

Wednesday, October 21, 2020 - 19:00