Next Up: Tues., Oct. 3, 2023 at NOON–Iron Artisans: Welsh Immigrants and the American Age of Steel with Ron Lewis
America’s emergence as a global industrial superpower was built on iron and steel. Despite their comparatively small numbers, no immigrant group played a more strategic role per capita in advancing basic industry than Welsh workers and managers. Focusing on the intersection of transnational immigration history, ethnic history, and labor history, Ronald Lewis analyzes continuity and change, and how Americanization worked within a small, relatively privileged, working-class ethnic group.
Oct. 10, 2023 Wheeling Poetry Series Welcomes Jeff Worley
Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2019-2020, is the author of seven book-length collections of poetry, including The Poet Laureate of Aurora Avenue: Selected Poems, Broadstone Books. Worley has received 3 Al Smith Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. His poems have appeared in over 500 literary magazines and journals. Website: jeff-worley.com. The Poetry Series is curated by W.V. Poet Laureate, Marc Harshman.
Oct. 13, 2023 (Fri. @12:30) WSO Festival of Ideas: Violins of Hope Panel
As a prelude to the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra’s Masterworks 1 concert, featuring the Violins of Hope project. https://www.violins-of-hope.com/, the WSO is offering a “Festival of Ideas” panel that will further inform audiences about the restoration of violins that were confiscated and discarded by the Nazis from Jewish musicians during the Holocaust and later discovered in a variety of locations. The panel will include Maestro John Devlin, Rabbi Lief, and Roi Mezare, the WSO’s principal clarinetist. Note: The is a special Friday at 12:30 edition of Lunch With Books.
Oct. 17, 2023 Collective Chaos: A Roller Derby Team Memoir by Samantha Tucker and Amy Spears
Through stories about playing this full-contact, theatrical, and revolutionary sport, Collective Chaos shows the value of gaining a truly radical self-knowledge through teamwork, love, discipline, and critical consideration of our local and global societies and of our roles and responsibilities within them.
Oct. 24, 2023 WWII Hellships
The National American Defenders of Bataan & Corregidor (ADBC) Museum, Education & Research Center in Brooke County will tell us about the horrors of WWII “Hellships.” Rich Lizza, Intro; POWs as the Museum’s Founders with Mary Kay Wallace; experiences as Pows. e.g. the “Hellships” with James Brockman; Liberation, Coming Home, and the Pows’ Postwar World with Joseph Vater.
Oct. 31, 2023 Halloween Special: Or-Sean Welles as Count Dracula!
For this year’s bloody-good Halloween special, we (OCPL staff and you, OCPL patrons!) will perform the radio play of “Dracula,” adapted by Orson Welles from the Bram Stoker classic and further adapted by Sean Duffy for our beloved Wheeling and OCPL Theatre On-the-Air!. First, we will screen the new OCPL Horror feature film: “The Hempfield Vampire!”
