The Free Association Reading Series returns for this year’s fourth installment of intimate readings. This month’s program features exceptional local writers Carolyn P. Speranza, Heather McNaugher, Cedric Rudolph, & Jolene McIlwain. This series is co-curated by Pat Hart and Marc Nieson.

Carolyn P. Speranza is premiering "He Used to Get Away with Everything." The piece is an excerpt from her new, developing work, “This is the Last Time a Relationship Will Make Me Sick.” A visual and conceptual artist, Carolyn uses light, video, and assemblage to create installation art environments, public art, and self-illuminating art objects. Her artist books are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Printed Matter, Franklin Furnace, and Carnegie Mellon Hunt Library. They have also been exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her ongoing Augury Art Studio projects can be found on Instagram @AuguryArt.

Heather McNaugher teaches literature and writing at her alma mater, Chatham University, where she is the nonfiction editor of the Fourth River. She is the author of Second-order Desire and System of Hideouts and two poetry chapbooks, Panic & Joy and Double Life. Her collection, States of Emergency, won the 2021 Southern Humanities Review Editors’ Chapbook Prize for Fiction. She’s lived in Seattle and Brooklyn and received her Ph.D. in English from The State University of New York at Binghamton. A nostalgic librarian, she once worked for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where you will find her on a near daily basis wandering among the novels.

Cedric Rudolph moved to Pittsburgh, PA in 2016. Two years later, he received his MFA from Chatham University. He is currently the Diverse Faculty Fellow Instructor at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC). At CCAC, he teaches creative writing and composition classes, and he is developing a storytelling initiative with other faculty. He is one of the founding editors for Beautiful Cadaver, which publishes social justice-themed anthologies and stages theatrical performances. His poems are published in The Laurel Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook, and The Coal Hill Review.

Jolene McIlwain’s fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in West Branch, Florida Review, Cincinnati Review, New Orleans Review, Northern Appalachia Review, and 2019's Best Small Fictions Anthology. Her work was named a finalist for  2018’s Best of the Net, Glimmer Train’s,  and River Styx’s contests, and a semifinalist in Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize and two American Short Fictions contests. She’s received a Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council grant, the Georgia Court Chautauqua faculty scholarship, and Tinker Mountain’s merit scholarship. She taught literary theory/analysis at Duquesne and Chatham Universities, and she worked as a radiologic technologist before attending college (BS English, minor in sculpture, MA Literature). Her debut collection of short stories, Sidle Creek, will be out in May with Melville House.

Free Association Reading Series: Carolyn P. Speranza, Heather McNaugher, Cedric Rudolph, & Jolene McIlwain