The Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press

University of Pittsburgh Press

The University of Pittsburgh Press is a scholarly publishing house and a major American university press, part of the University of Pittsburgh. The university and the press are located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States....

  in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

, USA, is one of the largest and best known lists of contemporary American poetry.

History

The Pitt Poetry Series was established in 1968 by press director Frederick A. Hetzel

Frederick A. Hetzel

Frederick Armstrong Hetzel was an American publisher and academic.-Biography:Hetzel was born and raised in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. He received degrees from Washington and Jefferson College and the University of Virginia...

 and press editor Paul Zimmer

Paul Zimmer (poet)

-Life:He flunked out of college, and worked in a steel mill.From 1954 to 1955 Zimmer served in the United States Army as a journalist. The Ribs of Death, his first book, was published in 1967....

. The Series received initial funding through the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust and its president Theodore L. Hazlett, via the agency of the International Poetry Forum and its director, Samuel Hazo

Samuel Hazo

Samuel Robert Hazo is an American composer of primarily music for concert band.-Career:Samuel R. Hazo resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife and children. In 2003, Mr. Hazo became the first composer in history to be awarded the winner of both composition contests sponsored by the...

. From the mid-1970s to the present many volumes have been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

 and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts is an agency serving the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.Established in 1966, its mission is "to foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in Pennsylvania and to broaden the availability and appreciation of those arts throughout the state." Each year...

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During its entire history the Pitt Poetry Series has had only two general editors: Paul Zimmer

Paul Zimmer (poet)

-Life:He flunked out of college, and worked in a steel mill.From 1954 to 1955 Zimmer served in the United States Army as a journalist. The Ribs of Death, his first book, was published in 1967....

 (1968-1978) and Ed Ochester

Ed Ochester

Edwin Frank Ochester is an American poet and editor.Born September 15 in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison....

 (1979 to the present).

Poets

Poets in the Pitt Series include Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds

-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...

, Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...

, Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.-Early Life:...

, Lawrence Joseph

Lawrence Joseph

Lawrence Joseph is an American poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and professor of law.-Life:Joseph's grandparents, Lebanese Maronite and Syrian Melkite Eastern Catholics, were among the first Arab Americans to emigrate to Detroit, where both Joseph's parents were born...

, Jon Anderson

Jon Anderson (poet)

Jon Victor Anderson was an American poet.Anderson's first book, Looking for Jonathan, was an inaugural selection of the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1967...

, Richard Shelton

Richard Shelton

Richard Shelton is an English actor and singer, best known to millions for playing the role of Dr Adam Forsythe on British television's daytime Soap Opera Emmerdale on ITV1...

, Larry Levis

Larry Levis

Larry Patrick Levis was an American poet.-Youth and Education:Larry Levis was born the son of a grape grower; he grew up driving a tractor, picking grapes, and pruning vines of Selma, California, a small fruit-growing town in the San Joaquin Valley...

, Robert Louthan

Robert Louthan

-Life:He graduated from Goddard College Writing Program with an M.F.A. in 1978.His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares,-External links:*...

, Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels

James Raymond Daniels is an American poet and writer.Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English.He won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in...

, Michael S. Harper

Michael S. Harper

Michael Steven Harper is an American poet from Brooklyn, who was the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. He has published ten books of poetry, two of which, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane" and "Images of Kin" , have been nominated for the National Book Award. A great deal of his poetry...

, Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Gösta Tranströmer is a Swedish writer, poet and translator, whose poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War...

, John Balaban

John Balaban

John B. Balaban is an American poet and translator, an authority on Vietnamese literature.-Biography:Balaban was born in a housing project neighborhood in Philadelphia to Romanian immigrant parents, Phillip and Alice Georgies Balaban...

, Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie

Norman Dubie is an American poet.-Life:He is the author of more than eighteen books, often assuming historical personae in his works...

, Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...

, Odysseus Elytis, Gary Soto

Gary Soto

Gary Soto is a Mexican-American author and poet.Mexican-American parents Manuel and Angie Soto . In his youth, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley and in factories in Fresno. Gary's father died in 1957, when he was just five years old...

, Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek

-Personal life:Dybek was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dybek graduated from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1959...

, Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Thompson Norris was an American novelist and wife of fellow writer Charles Norris, whom she wed in 1909...

, Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.Alicia is married to the noted astronomer Jeremiah Ostriker who taught at Princeton University...

, Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte

Toi Derricotte is an American poet and a professor of writing at University of Pittsburgh.At Wayne State University she earned a B.A. in 1965 and an M.A...

, and David Wojahn

David Wojahn

David Wojahn is a contemporary American poet who teaches poetry in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts...

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Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The Pitt Series annually awards a prize for a first book, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize is a major American literary award for a first full-length book of poetry in the English language.This prize of the University of Pittsburgh Press in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA was initiated by Ed Ochester and developed by Frederick A. Hetzel. The prize is...

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External links

• The Pitt Poetry Series Homepage