Join us at the Literary Cleveland offices on Saturday, October 26 from 6-9pm as we celebrate our graduating class of Breakthrough writers with a very special presentation of their work and recognition of their hard work as participants in the 2023-2024 LIT CLE Breakthrough Writing Residency.
Doors open at 6, then enjoy readings from all six residents from 6:30-8:30 followed by a mixer with snacks and drinks until 9pm.
RESIDENTS
Patricia Brubaker (fiction) has been writing in some form most of her life. She grew up in a single parent household and worked to save enough money to attend Cleveland State University and receive degrees in English Literature. While getting her degrees, she became the mother of three children but continued to find ways to write. Over twenty years ago she received an Ohio Arts Council Grant, published stories in literary journals, and seemed on her way to a writing career, but life got in her way when she became the guardian of her brother's three children in addition to her own. She began teaching English, earned a counseling degree, and worked as both a school counselor and mental health counselor for the next twenty-some years. Retiring in 2019 has allowed her to return her focus to her first love, writing. She is currently working on a novel about three high school friends, now in their sixties, whose lives are altered when they learn that the bodies of two of their friends who disappeared in 1970 have been found.
Maureen McGuirk (fiction) earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in writing for film and television from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her short story “Miss Fortunate” was published in quiet Shorts, a Seattle-based arts journal. Her one-act play “A Private Conversation” earned an honorable mention in the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2016 and was published in Two Sisters Writing & Publishing Second Annual Anthology in 2019. In December 2021, her short story “Rule 49” was included in B-Cubed Press’s anthology Alternative Deathiness. Recently, her short story "Last of My Kind" was accepted into Ohio Writers Association's anthology House of Secrets due out this fall. She is at work on a novel about Jason and Morgan, a newly engaged couple in a world where married couples share not only their lives but a single body.
Libby Chaney (nonfiction) has always been an artist and writer. She was born, raised and educated in Ohio, but she wandered off to California in her 20s. There she inadvertently stayed for 47 years. She taught, traveled a bit, married and had 2 children. After her son suddenly died, she was drawn back to her Ohio and the edge of Lake Erie — Cleveland, exactly — where she lives in a studio made from a converted mid-century medical center. She changed its large parking lot into a huge garden. During COVID Libby had a surprise triple bypass heart surgery and might not have survived without the care and love of her third and final husband, Paul Waszink. Neither would the garden. She is at work on a memoir in stories about everything from her high school days when girls were not allowed to take Mechanical Drawing to the 60's in Los Angeles to the loss of her son.
Elizabeth O'Donnell (nonfiction) was born and raised in England and is a triplet, one of seven children of a single mother. She left the United Kingdom at age eighteen and emigrated to Canada as a nanny, a job she held for three years while studying part-time to earn acceptance into the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with a degree in physical therapy. Liz later moved to the United States with her partner and raised two sons, attended graduate school where she earned her MSE and PhD in Counseling and currently works full-time as a clinical psychotherapist. Liz is raising yellow- lab, Delta, for Guiding eyes for the Blind until she is sixteen months old when Delta will return to GEB's Canine Development Center to complete her formal seeing-eye dog training. She is at work on a memoir about growing up poor in England in the late 50's and 60's as one of seven children of a single bi-racial mother.
Kristin Gustafson (poetry) is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Otterbein University in 2019, and her poetry has been published in over a dozen literary magazines. She currently lives in Cuyahoga Falls with her partner and small dog. Her work infuses her love of internet culture with her struggles with mental illness.
Jenna Martinez (poetry) is a queer, Mexican-American femme originally from San Antonio, Texas living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in Homology Lit and Femme, Collectively Zine 0.1. Her poem, “Elemental”, was the third-place winner of the 2023 One Page Poetry contest. Jenna is a recipient of the Support for Artists grant from the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center funded by Cuyahoga Arts. Her art is influenced by curanderismo, the cosmos, and community. She is at work on a collection of poems exploring how the places she has lived alchemize her intersecting identities including her queerness, Mexican heritage, Texas roots, and Midwestern home.
Join us at the Literary Cleveland offices on Saturday, October 26 from 6-9pm as we celebrate our graduating class of Breakthrough writers with a very special presentation of their work and recognition of their hard work as participants in the 2023-2024 LIT CLE Breakthrough Writing Residency.
Doors open at 6, then enjoy readings from all six residents from 6:30-8:30 followed by a mixer with snacks and drinks until 9pm.
RESIDENTS
Patricia Brubaker (fiction) has been writing in some form most of her life. She grew up in a single parent household and worked to save enough money to attend Cleveland State University and receive degrees in English Literature. While getting her degrees, she became the mother of three children but continued to find ways to write. Over twenty years ago she received an Ohio Arts Council Grant, published stories in literary journals, and seemed on her way to a writing career, but life got in her way when she became the guardian of her brother's three children in addition to her own. She began teaching English, earned a counseling degree, and worked as both a school counselor and mental health counselor for the next twenty-some years. Retiring in 2019 has allowed her to return her focus to her first love, writing. She is currently working on a novel about three high school friends, now in their sixties, whose lives are altered when they learn that the bodies of two of their friends who disappeared in 1970 have been found.
Maureen McGuirk (fiction) earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in writing for film and television from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her short story “Miss Fortunate” was published in quiet Shorts, a Seattle-based arts journal. Her one-act play “A Private Conversation” earned an honorable mention in the New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest in 2016 and was published in Two Sisters Writing & Publishing Second Annual Anthology in 2019. In December 2021, her short story “Rule 49” was included in B-Cubed Press’s anthology Alternative Deathiness. Recently, her short story "Last of My Kind" was accepted into Ohio Writers Association's anthology House of Secrets due out this fall. She is at work on a novel about Jason and Morgan, a newly engaged couple in a world where married couples share not only their lives but a single body.
Libby Chaney (nonfiction) has always been an artist and writer. She was born, raised and educated in Ohio, but she wandered off to California in her 20s. There she inadvertently stayed for 47 years. She taught, traveled a bit, married and had 2 children. After her son suddenly died, she was drawn back to her Ohio and the edge of Lake Erie — Cleveland, exactly — where she lives in a studio made from a converted mid-century medical center. She changed its large parking lot into a huge garden. During COVID Libby had a surprise triple bypass heart surgery and might not have survived without the care and love of her third and final husband, Paul Waszink. Neither would the garden. She is at work on a memoir in stories about everything from her high school days when girls were not allowed to take Mechanical Drawing to the 60's in Los Angeles to the loss of her son.
Elizabeth O'Donnell (nonfiction) was born and raised in England and is a triplet, one of seven children of a single mother. She left the United Kingdom at age eighteen and emigrated to Canada as a nanny, a job she held for three years while studying part-time to earn acceptance into the University of Toronto, from which she graduated with a degree in physical therapy. Liz later moved to the United States with her partner and raised two sons, attended graduate school where she earned her MSE and PhD in Counseling and currently works full-time as a clinical psychotherapist. Liz is raising yellow- lab, Delta, for Guiding eyes for the Blind until she is sixteen months old when Delta will return to GEB's Canine Development Center to complete her formal seeing-eye dog training. She is at work on a memoir about growing up poor in England in the late 50's and 60's as one of seven children of a single bi-racial mother.
Kristin Gustafson (poetry) is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She received her bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Otterbein University in 2019, and her poetry has been published in over a dozen literary magazines. She currently lives in Cuyahoga Falls with her partner and small dog. Her work infuses her love of internet culture with her struggles with mental illness.
Jenna Martinez (poetry) is a queer, Mexican-American femme originally from San Antonio, Texas living in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in Homology Lit and Femme, Collectively Zine 0.1. Her poem, “Elemental”, was the third-place winner of the 2023 One Page Poetry contest. Jenna is a recipient of the Support for Artists grant from the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center funded by Cuyahoga Arts. Her art is influenced by curanderismo, the cosmos, and community. She is at work on a collection of poems exploring how the places she has lived alchemize her intersecting identities including her queerness, Mexican heritage, Texas roots, and Midwestern home.
