Plum City Reading Series is Literary Cleveland's new regular reading series bringing the country's most interesting and groundbreaking authors to Cleveland. Plum City aims to highlight the work of independent publishers while thoughtfully curating celebratory evenings of literature and community.
Join us for our second 2025 reading featuring poet Ruth Awad (Outside the Joy) from Columbus, fiction writer Ananda Lima (Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil) from Chicago, and new CWRU professor and New York Times Magazine contributors Ben Mauk.
This installment of the Plum City Reading Series will take place Wednesday, February 26 at 7 pm at Loganberry Books (13015 Larchmere in Cleveland), to be immediately followed by an afterparty at the Literary Cleveland Offices (13002 Larchmere).
This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from Ohio Arts Council.
NOTE: In keeping with our mission, to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, the registration fee for this event is "Pay What You Can." We believe every writer, reader, storyteller, and literary enthusiast who wants to attend a Literary Cleveland event should be able to have that experience. "Pay What You Can" registration allows comfortable, affordable participation for everyone. We have suggested fees—you can pay one of them, or pay what you can. Your participation is the priority for us.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is also the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently appearing in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón, and can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors, edited by Cynthia Pelayo (Primer Sueño/Atria Books). She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal.The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York.
Ben Mauk is a writer and filmmaker. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Plum City Reading Series is Literary Cleveland's new regular reading series bringing the country's most interesting and groundbreaking authors to Cleveland. Plum City aims to highlight the work of independent publishers while thoughtfully curating celebratory evenings of literature and community.
Join us for our second 2025 reading featuring poet Ruth Awad (Outside the Joy) from Columbus, fiction writer Ananda Lima (Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil) from Chicago, and new CWRU professor and New York Times Magazine contributors Ben Mauk.
This installment of the Plum City Reading Series will take place Wednesday, February 26 at 7 pm at Loganberry Books (13015 Larchmere in Cleveland), to be immediately followed by an afterparty at the Literary Cleveland Offices (13002 Larchmere).
This engagement is supported by the Arts Midwest GIG Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional contributions from Ohio Arts Council.
NOTE: In keeping with our mission, to ensure diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, the registration fee for this event is "Pay What You Can." We believe every writer, reader, storyteller, and literary enthusiast who wants to attend a Literary Cleveland event should be able to have that experience. "Pay What You Can" registration allows comfortable, affordable participation for everyone. We have suggested fees—you can pay one of them, or pay what you can. Your participation is the priority for us.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is also the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently appearing in You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World edited by Ada Limón, and can be found in The Atlantic, AGNI, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors, edited by Cynthia Pelayo (Primer Sueño/Atria Books). She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal.The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York.
Ben Mauk is a writer and filmmaker. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American disabled poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy (Third Man Books, 2024) and Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017). She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio.
Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago.
Ben Mauk is a writer and filmmaker. His writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, and the London Review of Books, among other publications. His first book, The Fugitive World, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
