The Free Association Reading Series returns for this year's third installment of intimate readings. This month’s program features exceptional regional writers Heather Aronson, Marcel Walker, Deborah Bogen, and City of Asylum writer in residence, Anouar Rahmani. This series is co-curated by Pat Hart and Marc Nieson.

Marcel Lamont (M.L.) Walker is a Pittsburgh, PA native. He graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, taught comic-book production at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts for six years, and is an award-winning graphic-prose creator and authority on social applications for comic-book art. He is the lead artist, book designer, and project coordinator for the acclaimed comic-book series CHUTZ-POW! SUPERHEROES OF THE HOLOCAUST, published by The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. He has designed Veggie Heroes for the Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank, drawn live onstage while backed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and always champions comics as a force for social good. His favorite fictional hero is Superman and, given time, he can work the character into every conversation.

Heather Aronson’s fiction has appeared in several literary journals, including American Short Fiction, CRAFT, Mid-American Review, Sonora Review, Story, and Witness. She was the winner of Sonora Review’s RAGE contest in Fiction in 2022, and her stories have been finalists for the Story Foundation Prize and the CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest. Her story “What You Know” was nominated for Best Short Fiction 2020, and "This Isn't a Story" was just nominated by MonkeyBicycle for Best Short Fiction 2023. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona and was a Fellow in Fiction at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and some of their five adult children, and she has just taken on the unpaid but lovely task of reading submissions for Story Magazine.

Anouar Rahmani is a writer and human rights defender from Algeria. He is the author of four novels in Arabic, including Hallucinations of Jibril and What God is Hiding from Us. Through his creative writing, journalism, and activism, Anouar advocates for individual freedoms, environmental rights, and the rights of minorities, women, and the LGBT+ community. In 2015, he was the first person to publicly demand same-sex marriage in Algeria. Anouar holds a License in Public Law and Masters in State and Institutional Law from the University of Morsli Abdallah. During the 2019 Algerian Revolution, he composed a new model for the Algerian constitution. Anouar started his residency at City of Asylum and Carnegie Mellon University in January 2022.

Deborah Bogen's full length collections are In Case of Sudden Free Fall, Let Me Open You a Swan, Landscape With Silos, and her recently published Speak Now This Charm. She sings and plays guitar with the Highland Park MiniBand and works with other Pittsburgh activists to try and create good political change.

Free Association Reading Series: Marcel Walker, Heather Aronson, Anouar Rahmani, & Deborah Bogen