Speakers

• Patricia Thrushart Poet, Author
  

  Patricia Thrushart

  Poet, Author

  Patricia Thrushart is a writer and poet living in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains just outside of award-winning Cook Forest State Park in the Wilds of Pennsylvania. The beauty of Northern Appalachia and its forests informs her poetry. A poet writes to satisfy a need to express emotion or document life; having readers actually interested in sharing those moments is both exhilarating and humbling. If reading any of these poems creates in you a sense of gratitude, awareness or an appreciation of the beauty of our natural world, then she can consider her effort to be worthwhile. Beyond her poetry, she writes narrative nonfiction books that explore the lives of historical women whose stories have been lost to time.

• PJ Piccirillo Author, Editor, Professor
  

  PJ Piccirillo

  Author, Editor, Professor

  PJ Piccirillo, who holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, is an author, editor, and adjunct (Butler County Community College). He is a regular presenter in the humanities, having worked for 19 years as a Pennsylvania Literary Resident Artist for the PA Council on the Arts, and as a literary scholar for the PA Humanities Council. Piccirillo is founder of the WCoNA Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia® and The Northern Appalachia Review, for which he is editor-in-chief.