In Issue 20.2, one of our twentieth-anniversary issues, we present a special feature on where writing lives in Cincinnati. We reached out to six writers who are current or former residents of the city, giving them the following prompt:
We’ve been thinking about Cincinnati as the site of intersections: of North and South, with the subversive crossing between them by the Underground Railroad; of the geography shaped by an advancing and then retreating glacier, the Ohio River, and the hills; of the Indigenous Algonquian speaking tribes, including the Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee tribes, whose land was taken by white settlers as it became known as Losantiville in 1888. We’re interested, also, in thinking about how the diverse strands of our literary community intersect (or not) here in Cincinnati. Though our various groups focused on creative writing have sometimes felt like separate silos, the Cincinnati Poet Laureate position, the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library writer-in-residence program, and other initiatives like it are breaking down those divisions at times. What is the story of Cincinnati and its literature(s), from your point of view? Where does writing “live” here?
We’re pleased to share the entire feature, which includes
- Pauletta Hansel’s “The Neighborhoods of Literary Cincinnati: A Personal History”
- Jim Palmarini’s poem “WELCOME TO THE READING: A Five-Decade Tour of Cincinnati’s Aural/Oral Poetry Scene”
- Tyrone Williams’s “Arrested Cross-Fertilization”
- L. S. Klatt’s “Kenneth Koch, Cincinnatian, Poet of Confetti”
- MoPoetry Phillips’s “Writing Therapy: Spoken Word in the Corporate World”
- Natalie Villacorta’s “Stories Worth Telling”
(To use the PDF embedder to see additional pages, use the arrows on the bottom left-hand side.)
full-Cincinnati-feature
