Author Events

Philip Eil: PRESCRIPTION FOR PAIN

Thursday, May 30, 7:00PM
Join us for an author talk and book signing with Philip Eil about his new book, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the "Pill Mill Killer" about an Ohio tragedy.

This haunting and propulsive debut follows a journalist’s years-long investigation into his father’s old classmate: former high school valedictorian Paul Volkman, who once seemed destined for greatness after earning his MD and his PhD from the prestigious University of Chicago, but is now serving four consecutive life sentences at a federal prison in Arizona after his role in the opioid crisis was linked to at least 13 deaths in Southern Ohio.

Philip Eil is an award-winning freelance journalist based in his hometown, Providence, Rhode Island. He has contributed to The Atlantic, Men’s Health, the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other outlets. He has also taught writing and journalism classes at Brown University, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and the Rhode Island School of Design.This is his first book.
 

BECAUSE BARBARA, book signing with illustrator Eileen Ryan Ewen

Sunday, June 2, 1:00PM
Join Cleveland Local illustrator Eileen Ryan Ewen for a reading and discussion of her newest title, Because Barbara by Sarah Mackenzie.

Legendary picture book creator Barbara Cooney once noticed that the library in her little town by the sea needed attention. A library, she knew, should be a kind of paradise. And because Barbara did whatever she set her mind to, she made it one.

Barbara Cooney set her mind to lots of things-none so dear as capturing the beauty of the world in her paintings. These paintings would form the settings for her award-winning picture books, including Chanticleer and the Fox, Ox-Cart Man, Miss Rumphius, Roxaboxen, and others.

Follow Barbara from New York to Maine, from the shores of Greece to the mountains of Appalachia, as she captures their beauty and creates some of the most magnificent books for children ever published.

Eileen has also worked on Miss Colfax's Light by Aimee Bissonette; Nature's Friend by Lindsey McDivitt; H is for Honeybee by Robyn Smith van Frankenhuyzen; and Mr. McGinty's Monarchs by Linda Vander Heyden
 

 

Jake Maynard and Mary Quade in Conversation

Sunday, June 9, 1:00PM
Please join authors Jake Maynard and Mary Quade (Zoo World ) as they discuss Jake's new book Slime Line.
 
Equal parts workplace satire and character study in delusion, Slime Line is a fresh and urgently needed examination of work, grief, the male ego, and the false promise of environmental capitalism.



A fresh and trippy portrait of the diverse underclass of the commercial fishing industry, Slime Line is a tragicomedy of one college dropout’s attempts to remake himself into a hard-nosed workingman.
 
 

Lit Cleveland Plum City Readings

Wednesday, June 12, 7:00PM
The Plum City Reading Series is Literary Cleveland's regular reading series bringing the country's most interesting and groundbreaking authors to Cleveland. Come join us for the third installment at Loganberry Books!

This reading is partnership with Kundiman Midwest, featuring local poet Philip Metres, author of the newly-released Fugitive/Refuge, alongside incredible visiting authors Helene Achanzar, Asha Thanki, and Jess Yuan.
 
Register to attend here! NOTE: In keeping with Lit Cleveland's mission to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, the registration fee for this event is "Pay What You Can."
 
   

Broadsides & Ephemera: TRIPLE FEATURE!

Thursday, June 13, 6:00PM
Tonight's featured readers are George David Clark, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Ryan Wilson! 

George David Clark is the author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize) and Newly Not Eternal (from LSU Press). David’s recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Believer, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. After earning an MFA at the University of Virginia and a PhD at Texas Tech University, David held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and, later, the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship at Valparaiso University.  He’s received additional honors from Southern Poetry Review (the Guy Owen Prize), Narrative Magazine (the 30 Below Prize), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (a Walter E. Dakin fellowship), among others. The editor-in-chief of 32 Poems, he previously served in various capacities on the staffs of Meridian, Iron Horse Literary Magazine, and the Best New Poets anthology. Since 2015 David has taught creative writing and literature at Washington & Jefferson College, where he is now an associate professor.

 Matthew Buckley Smith has had poems and stories appear in AGNI, American Life in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Amazon’s Day One, Fairy Tale Review, Harvard Review, Subtropics, and Threepenny Review. His second book of poems, Midlife, was selected by David Yezzi for the 2021 Richard Wilbur Award. His first book of poems, Dirge for an Imaginary World, was selected by Andrew Hudgins for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. 

Ryan Wilson is the author of The Stranger World (Measure Press, 2017), winner of The Donald Justice Poetry Prize, of How to Think Like a Poet (Wiseblood, 2019), which was awarded the Jacques Maritain Prize by the Catholic journal Dappled Things, Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 (Franciscan University Press, 2021), and In Ghostlight: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets, LSU, 2024). Wilson’s poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry and Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, and his work has been published widely in periodicals such as 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, Image, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review. He teaches at The Catholic University of America and in the M.F.A. program at The University of St. Thomas-Houston. Since 2016, Wilson has been Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters. Wilson also serves as the C.F.O. and administrator of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), an international non-profit that promotes the study of literature in both creative and scholarly contexts.

 

 

Mark Sullivan on "Thrive: When Trouble Visits!"

Sunday, June 16, 3:00PM
Join author Mark Sullivan for the launch of his new book THRIVE: When Trouble Visits!
 
THRIVE is a leadership book filled with true stories, practical tips, and actionable tools that help you to thrive when it matters most. Experience up-close the challenging journeys and successes of several of the 100 extraordinary people interviewed, like a Green Barret combat warrior surviving under horrific conditions, a lunar modular mission commander cut off from NASA in space; a Holocaust survivor; a billionaire on the edge of losing it all; and a university president with a campus flattened by Hurricane Katrina. 

To join the talk via Zoom, click here.

Magical Realism Book Club: BELOVED

Thursday, June 20, 7:00PM
For its final session, Magical Realism Bookclub will meet to discuss Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's Beloved, perhaps her most iconic work, which follows the long shadow of slavery in the life of one woman, Sethe, and her beloved infant child.

This bookclub is lead by community member Nathan Klainer. Nathan lives in Cleveland Heights with his wife and two cats. He has a passion for bringing people together and for reading, and can’t wait to meet others to discuss great novels!
 

Mike Petrello signing "Rock Shots: Iconic Images of the Greatest Era of Rock and Roll"

Sunday, July 7, 1:00PM

Join Mike Petrello as he signs copies of his new book Rock Shots: Iconic Images of the Greatest Era of Rock and Roll.
 
Mike Petrello's new book takes you inside the most iconic era of Rock and Roll history. A unique look at the heydays of the Cleveland rock and roll scene through the camera lens of local photographer Mike Petrello. Rock Shots is a chronological tour through over 110 concerts documented by more than 400 color concert photos, including 80 bands and 200 individual performers, covering legendary concerts from 1974-1983. Over 50 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees are shown in this book. 
 

Broadsides & Ephemera

Thursday, July 11, 7:00PM
Tonight's featured reader is former Ohio Poet Laureate Amit Majmudar!

Amit Majmudar is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary (2020); Dothead (2016); Heaven and Earth (2011), which poet A.E. Stallings chose for a Donald Justice Poetry Prize; and 0˚, 0˚ (2009), which was a finalist for a Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. Majmudar has also published the novels Sitayana (2019), Partitions (2011), and The Abundance (2013). In 2018, he published Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary.

Majmudar’s poetry has been featured in several anthologies, including Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012 (2013, edited by Robert Pinsky) and The Norton Introduction to Literature (2012, 11th edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays). He has also contributed essays to the Kenyon Review blog, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books.
 
He lives in Dublin, Ohio, where he served as Ohio’s first poet laureate. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist.

 

Sarah Gerard signing "Carrie Carolyn Coco"

Sunday, July 28, 3:00PM
Join author Sarah Gerard as she discusses her new book Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable

Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as nuanced and subtly intimate (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State.

On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?

This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah's exploration of Carolyn's life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn's and Render's friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn's memorials and Render's trial.

What emerged from Sarah's relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn's life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.

 

 

 

 

Author Alley 2024

Saturday, August 10, 12:00PM
Please join us again this year in featuring and celebrating local authors from Ohio and the surrounding areas! We will be hosting a weekend festival-style book fair that is FREE to attend August 9-11, 2024. More details to come.

 

Author Alley 2024

Sunday, August 11, 12:00PM
Please join us again this year in featuring and celebrating local authors from Ohio and the surrounding areas! We will be hosting a weekend festival-style book fair that is FREE to attend August 9-11, 2024. More details to come.