Literary Partners: Claudia Stanek & Patricia Roth Schwartz

Claudia Stanek & Patricia Roth Schwartz

Free & open to the public

Claudia M. Stanek grew up in the blur of murmurs and silences of Polish-accented English while living on the border of Polish-Catholic steel town Depew and German-Lutheran rural Lancaster in Western New York State. Her Language You Refuse to Learn was the 2013 co-winner of the Bright Hill Press chapbook contest, Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Dime Show Review, Inscape, Modern Poetry Quarterly, and Ithaca Lit, and in the anthologies Cinquainicity, Community Voices, and Le Mot Juste. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and lives in East Rochester, NY. 

Patricia Roth Schwartz is a poet, writer of fiction and memoir, editor, and teacher. Published widely in literary journals, she has seven volumes of poetry to her credit, including Charleston: A Memoir in Poems of a West Virginia Childhood, as well as a Lambda Literary Award-winning collection of short fiction. Her work appears in the Story Walk and Poets’ Walk installations in Rochester. For 14 years, she volunteered weekly at Auburn Correctional Facility conducting poetry workshops with inmates; Her Soul Knows No Bars: A Writer’s Journey Doing Poetry with Inmates was released by Olive Trees Publishing in October 2019.  Patricia is a co-founder of The Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes, a grass-roots organization dedicated to creative expression. Visit  http://www.patriciarothschwartz.com/.