This program will feature a poetry reading and photography exhibit by Paola Corso along with a local history presentation by Lee Ann Draud. Q & A and Book signing to follow. Light refreshments served. Corso’s photos will be exhibited through the month of October.

About Paola Corso

Paola Corso’s fiction and poetry books are set in her native Pittsburgh and included on Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Literary Map. Her latest is “Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps.” She co-founded Steppin Stanzas, a grant-awarded poetry and performance project celebrating Pittsburgh public stairways and paying tribute to the early immigrants who built them in a short video, “On the Way Up: City Steps, City Immigrants.” Corso’s essay on city steps was published in Western Pennsylvania History Magazine and a short vignette of her was aired at the Pittsburgh City Steps Symposium. As a member of a Brooklyn artist’s collective, she exhibits her photographs in open studios and galleries. Her first solo photography exhibit, “Vertical Bridges,” includes not only city steps in Pittsburgh but countries where she travels, most recently Turkey and Mexico. www.paolacorso.com

About Lee Ann Draud

Lee Ann Draud is a transplant from the eastern part of the state who came to Pittsburgh to ride roller coasters at Kennywood and fell in love with the city and its industrial history. She first spotted steps driving up I-279, discovered Bob Regan’s book “The Steps of Pittsburgh” and made it her goal to climb them all. In climbing and photographing the steps, she has discovered how they connected lives and neighborhoods and how so much of the city’s history can be seen just by climbing some steps. Lee Ann was born in Cincinnati, Ohio—another city with hills and city steps–and has graduate degrees in anthropology and political science. She works as a copyediting administrator for a medical publisher, is the publications director for the American Coaster Enthusiasts, and is also a volunteer at the History Center in the Detre Library & Archives.