Writing and Publishing Senior’s Play to Get Staged Reading Saturday at City Theatre

A senior Writing and Publishing major will have her original comedy presented Saturday in a staged reading through Pittsburgh’s City Theatre.

West Homestead native Erin Brody’s play “The Battle of the Exes” will be presented at 4 p.m. Saturday via Zoom. The staged reading will be free and open to the public.

Brody’s play is part of the Young Playwright’s Festival Honorable Mention Readings. “The Battle of the Exes” is a comedy about two jilted lovers — one an angry wedding crasher, the other a brokenhearted beta male — and their unlikely pairing to get revenge at their exes’ wedding.

The play started life in a playwriting workshop at Lincoln Park last year. “This play was received well in the class I had to write to for,” Brody recalls. “A lot of people encouraged me to revise it — which I did, several times.”

The dialogue between the two feuding protagonists is a high point, and Brody says that is a particular area of focus.

“As an actor, I’ve always admired other people’s scripts, and how clever they were,” she says. “so it’s cool to be on the other side of that.”

Brody has been a writing and publishing major since she entered Lincoln Park as a freshman in 2017. She is currently the editor-in-chief of SIREN Media Group, which oversees the school newspaper, The SIREN. She is also the prose editor of Pulp, Lincoln Park’s award-winning literary and art journal.

However, she also has several credits onstage and behind the scenes at Lincoln Park. 

She has appeared in two previous One-Act Festivals at the school, and had roles in two additional one-act plays for last year’s festival, which was canceled because of the pandemic. She also served as assistant stage manager of Frozen Jr., and worked on technical crews for The Addams Family and Snow White: The Ballet. She is in her third year as a member of the International Thespian Society.

Brody, who also volunteers as a youth mentor at The Center in Midland, plans to attend Saint Vincent College this fall. There, she will major in English, in the Publishing track, and will also pursue her teaching certification.

Meanwhile, playwriting is something she plans to continue. She will continue to submit work to contests and for possible production opportunities, and hopes to have the chance to have her work produced on campus.

“I don’t know if it’ll take me anywhere big,” Brody says of playwriting. “But even if I just have it for myself, I’ll be happy.”

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To see Erin Brody’ s play, “The Battle of the Exes,” join the Zoom meeting link below at 4 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 13. No registration is required.

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Bestselling Author Ben Westhoff Joins Lincoln Park Journalism Students for Master Class

Ben Westhoff, the author of the bestselling expose Fentantyl, Inc., recently joined Writing and Publishing students at Lincoln Park for a master class in journalism.

Bestselling author Ben Westhoff. Photo by Yana Hotter.

Westhoff, who went undercover in China to research and report his expose of the global opioid epidemic, advised the staff of The SIREN to be persistent in their reporting.

“You have to be determined,” Westhoff told members of Lincoln Park’s school newspaper, during a Zoom visit in December. “A lot of people are going to try to put you off. You just have to keep digging.”

Westhoff’s book, subtitled “How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic,” was published in 2019 by Atlantic Monthly Press and has since been featured on numerous “Best-of” lists.

USA Today praised the book as “(a)n impressive work of investigative journalism,” while popular podcast host Joe Rogan — who invited Westhoff on his show as a guest — called it a “really fascinating book on a terrifying subject.”

Westhoff told students about his visits to Chinese laboratories where fentanyl is produced and sold to buyers from around the world. He admitted that there were times he worried about his safety.

Ultimately, he said, “I just felt like this was a story that needed to be told.”

Westhoff got his start working for the alternative weeklies Riverfront Times and L.A. Weekly. He has written two previous books, both of them widely praised histories of hip hop. His 2011 book Dirty South: OutKast, Lil Wayne, Soulja Boy, and the Southern Rappers Who Reinvented Hip-Hop was a Library Journal best seller.

Meanwhile, Academy Award nominee S. Leigh Savidge, the co-writer of the film Straight Outta Compton, said that Westhoff’s 2016 book Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap, "may be the best book ever written about the hip hop world."

Westhoff has also written for the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and Vice. In addition, he has advised government officials about the fentanyl epidemic.

Lincoln Park Plans First Pittsburgh Enrollment Seminar

Throughout its 14-year history, Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School has always drawn students from well outside its home base of Beaver County.

But in 2020, the school will take its message directly to those students. For the first time, Lincoln Park will hold an enrollment seminar off-campus, in an effort to bring information about its programs to students and families from the Pittsburgh area.

Lincoln Park will hold its first off-site enrollment seminar at Pittsburgh’s Hyatt Place North Shore from 6 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 29.

The free seminar will allow students entering grades 7-12, and their families, to speak with representatives of Lincoln Park’s arts departments, and learn more about the school and its mission.

“This is something we’ve been discussing for years, because the Pittsburgh area has been a steady source of students for our school since Day One,” said Dan LeRoy, the director of Lincoln Park’s Writing and Publishing Department. “We’re certainly looking forward to bringing our message directly to new students and families from this region.”

Participants can visit the Pittsburgh seminar at any time between 6 and 8 p.m. They will have a chance to ask questions about the school’s various arts departments, about its academic classes, the transportation schedule, and other details about Lincoln Park.

Because Lincoln Park will be hosting two enrollment seminars in February — one for prospective middle schoolers on Feb. 5, and one for prospective high schoolers on Feb. 12 — people who attend the Pittsburgh seminar will also have an opportunity to visit an enrollment seminar at Lincoln Park.

Lincoln Park is home to seven different arts departments, and enrolls students from more than 80 different school districts across Western Pennsylvania. It is a tuition-free public charter school, housed in a professional performing arts center, and is open to any student residing in Pennsylvania. Its website is lppacs.org.

Despite charter schools facing public opposition from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, Lincoln Park’s enrollment has continued to grow each year. The school is making plans to expand its facility with the addition of new classrooms and studio space. 

That growth, LeRoy said, is proof that outreach to the Pittsburgh area is well-timed.

“We always want to take our message straight to the public, because we believe when people learn all that Lincoln Park has to offer, and what a special school it is, they will be interested,” he said. 

“And we believe something that too many public schools these days don’t: that competition makes us better.”

Malcolm Friend Talks Poetry, Politics with W&P Students

Students in Lincoln Park’s Writing and Publishing Department got a tutorial in poetry and politics from Pittsburgh writer Malcolm Friend.

Friend, the author of the award-winning 2018 poetry collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple, visited Lincoln Park for three days in November to work with high school and middle school students.

The focus of Friend’s master classes for high school students was to expand on the idea that politics is more than simply what appears on the news. He led students through a selection of poems, ranging from classic to modern, and featuring voices that have traditionally been underrepresented in poetry. Friend then guided students in the writing of poetic styles such as the ode and the aubade. 

He told Lincoln Park’s school newspaper, The SIREN, that “I try to write from the idea that writing can belong to anyone.”

Friend is a native of Seattle, who graduated from Vanderbilt University. While at Vanderbilt, he received the 2014 Merrill Moore Prize for his poetry.

He later earned his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he now serves as a visiting lecturer. In 2017, his first chapbook, mxd kd mixtape, was published by Glass Poetry, and he followed that up with Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple, which was chosen by Cynthia Arrieu-King as the 2017 winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize.

Currently a poetry editor at FreezeRay Poetry, Friend also has received awards and fellowships from such organizations as CantoMundo, Backbone Press, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and the University of Memphis. 

Friend was selected as the third writer in Lincoln Park’s Visiting Writers Program. The program was started by Cindy West, who teaches middle school Writing and Publishing students.

West began the initiative in 2017, when best-selling author and ghostwriter Toni Robino visited Lincoln Park. Last year, young adult author Wende Dikec became the second visiting writer in the program. And this year, Friend became the first poet to appear in the series.

“Malcolm Friend was the perfect choice for the third year of the Writers Series. He’s young, hip, and award-winning, and related well to the students,” said West. “The way he transitioned his approach to sharing his work from high school to middle school was a pleasure to watch.”

She added, “The middle schoolers even stood in line to get his autograph!”

Seventh-grader Curtjuan Moore said he enjoyed Friend’s three-day master class for middle school students, which focused on the role of sampling in both music and poetry.

“It taught me new ways to write poems,” said Moore, who is from Aliquippa.

His classmate Quincy Sirko, a seventh-grader from Central Valley, said she appreciated the chance to get a different perspective about writing, as well as Friend’s encouragement to experiment with new styles.

“He told us that you have to keep trying a new thing until you gain fluency in it,” Sirko said.

Although he’s a rising star in the poetry field, Friend gave Writing and Publishing students some old-fashioned advice.

“Keep reading,” he said. “It’s so easy to get lost in writing that you forget to read.”