AS220’s Artistic Director, Umberto Crenca, was recently interviewed by the online magazine, Sampsonia Way, in conjunction with his visit to City of Asylum Pittsburgh in April. Check out the interview here!

Sampsonia Way is an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburghcelebrating literary free expression and supporting persecuted writers worldwide.

The magazine’s key staff includes exiled writers living on Sampsonia Way, a street in Pittsburgh that spans cultures and languages, which was conceived with their advice from within their own experience of exile and repression. Just as the physical Sampsonia Way provides a home for exiled writers in a revitalized community, SampsoniaWay.org aims to be a virtual home that mobilizes a widely dispersed international public to protect writers and writing by engaging writers and non-writers in a virtual community and by becoming a source for research and dialogue.

We seek to protect and advocate for writers who may be endangered, to educate the public about threats to writers and literary expression, and to create a community in which endangered writers thrive and literary culture is a valued part of everyday life. By “community” we include our local community and international readers and writers and those concerned to advance free expression where endangered, whether living in freedom or in countries that censor and persecute literary writers.