Hemingway's Summer Poetry Series - Week 5
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The 2026 HEMINGWAY’S SUMMER POETRY SERIES
The 52nd Anniversary Season @ Hop Farm Brewing Company
Eight Tuesdays – May through August 2026 @ 7 p.m. + Open mic
Founded by Jimmy Cvetic in 1974 or thereabouts.
Curated by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins
Audio archive: www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com
Tues July 14
Brian Broome, Erin Garstka, Margaret Kasper Reed,
Adriana Ramirez, Ed Steck
Author Bios:
Brian Broome’s debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is an NYT Editor’s Pick and the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. Until recently, he was a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in Hippocampus, Poets and Writers, Medium, and more. Brian was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. Brian also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. His film, Garbage, won the Audience Choice Award at the Cortada Short Film Festival and was a semi-finalist in the Portland Short Fest.
Erin Garstka is a retired home health occupational therapist. Invisible River Publishing released her chapbook, The Thought of a Hat in 2003. For some years, she and her husband Mark Garstka, led the Monroeville Poets Workshop. She is a longtime member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, a past winner of the Taproot Prize and the 2023 winner of the Westmoreland Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared recently in The Lyric, California Quarterly, and Time of Singing.
Adriana E. Ramírez is a columnist, author, critic, and poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub among others. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, was published by Scribner in April 2026. In recent years, she has written twice a week for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Margaret Kasper Reed’s poetry collections include Lament’s Grocery (Foothills Press) and Children of the Sky, an ekphrastic collection with artist Kathleen Huddle (Author House Press). She has published in numerous journals including Poet Lore, The English Journal and Rattle. Anthologies she has contributed to include 99 Poems on Joy, edited by Roger Housden and The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain, edited by Doralee Brooks. With pianist Gwen Beckman, she collaborated on Into Blue an original theatre production combining piano and poetry. She taught English in public high school and was an adjunct in the theatre department at Elmira College.
Ed Steck is the author of A Place Beyond Shame, An Interface of Fractal Landscape, The Garden and other works. He often explores themes of time travel, video games, horror, and technology in his writing. He is the co-owner of Fungus Books and co-editor of Sistrum. There’s a long interview with him on the Poetry Foundation website.
The 52nd Anniversary Season @ Hop Farm Brewing Company
Eight Tuesdays – May through August 2026 @ 7 p.m. + Open mic
Founded by Jimmy Cvetic in 1974 or thereabouts.
Curated by Joan E. Bauer & Kristofer Collins
Audio archive: www.hemingwayspoetryseries.blogspot.com
Tues July 14
Brian Broome, Erin Garstka, Margaret Kasper Reed,
Adriana Ramirez, Ed Steck
Author Bios:
Brian Broome’s debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is an NYT Editor’s Pick and the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. Until recently, he was a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in Hippocampus, Poets and Writers, Medium, and more. Brian was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a finalist in The Moth storytelling competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Writing Awards. Brian also won a VANN Award from the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation for journalism in 2019. His film, Garbage, won the Audience Choice Award at the Cortada Short Film Festival and was a semi-finalist in the Portland Short Fest.
Erin Garstka is a retired home health occupational therapist. Invisible River Publishing released her chapbook, The Thought of a Hat in 2003. For some years, she and her husband Mark Garstka, led the Monroeville Poets Workshop. She is a longtime member of the Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop, a past winner of the Taproot Prize and the 2023 winner of the Westmoreland Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared recently in The Lyric, California Quarterly, and Time of Singing.
Adriana E. Ramírez is a columnist, author, critic, and poet based in Pittsburgh. She won the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize in 2015 for her novella-length work of nonfiction, Dead Boys (Little A, 2016). Her reviews, essays, and poems have also appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, ESPN’s The Undefeated, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica/PEN America, and Literary Hub among others. Once a nationally ranked slam poet, she founded the infamous Nasty Slam in Pittsburgh and continues to perform on stages around the country. She and novelist Angie Cruz founded Aster(ix) Journal, a literary journal giving voice to the censored and the marginalized. Her debut full-length work of nonfiction, The Violence, was published by Scribner in April 2026. In recent years, she has written twice a week for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Margaret Kasper Reed’s poetry collections include Lament’s Grocery (Foothills Press) and Children of the Sky, an ekphrastic collection with artist Kathleen Huddle (Author House Press). She has published in numerous journals including Poet Lore, The English Journal and Rattle. Anthologies she has contributed to include 99 Poems on Joy, edited by Roger Housden and The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain, edited by Doralee Brooks. With pianist Gwen Beckman, she collaborated on Into Blue an original theatre production combining piano and poetry. She taught English in public high school and was an adjunct in the theatre department at Elmira College.
Ed Steck is the author of A Place Beyond Shame, An Interface of Fractal Landscape, The Garden and other works. He often explores themes of time travel, video games, horror, and technology in his writing. He is the co-owner of Fungus Books and co-editor of Sistrum. There’s a long interview with him on the Poetry Foundation website.
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Where is it happening?
Hop Farm Brewing Company, 5636 Berlin Way, Pittsburgh, PA 15201, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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Host or PublisherHemingway's Summer Poetry Series
