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Week Eight's writer in residence is Lori Jakiela. More information on Writers’ Center workshops available at learn.chq.org. Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazines & Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Award, and was named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. She is the author of two other memoirs – Miss New York Has Everything and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, as well as a poetry collection, Spot the Terrorist, an essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, and several chapbooks. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Chautauqua Magazine, and elsewhere. Jakiela has been awarded the City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize, multiple Golden Quill awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Bennington Writers Conferences, and more. Most recently, she was a finalist for the Stockholm First Pages Prize for her novel-in-progress, The Trailing Edge. She directs the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she is a professor of English and Creative/Professional Writing. She has co-directed the Chautauqua Institution’s Summer Writers Festival, and currently directs the summer Be Here Now yoga/writing retreats at Pitt-Greensburg and curates the Sunday Poem section for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her next collection of poems, How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen? is forthcoming in 2020. She lives in Trafford, PA with her husband and their children.