Pittsburgh is home to an incredible range of authors, publishing professionals, literary event organizers and opinion leaders.
Our city nurtures well-known and emerging literary talent and is the inspiration for many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In addition to the authors you may recognize, Littsburgh’s evolving literary roster features some of the passionate people who work behind the scenes to find local and national audiences for this work, and who help make Pittsburgh a haven for writers and readers.
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Personal Email: brett@poetspress.orgINTERNET
Website: Website
Biography
Brett Rutherford, born in Scottdale, PA, spent most of his years in New York City and Providence, RI, before moving to Pittsburgh in the fall of 2015. He has published sixteen volumes of his poetry, the most recent being Trilobite Love Song (2014) and An Expectation of Presences (2012). A neoRomantic poet with a strong emphasis on the supernatural, he has also edited an annotated edition of M.G. Lewis’s 1801 poetry anthology Tales of Wonder, and compiled a two-volume series, Tales of Terror: The Supernatural Poem Since 1800. Many of his poems use Western Pennsylvania as locale, most notably a 40-poem cycle, Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn. Some of his other editorial work has centered on lost World War I-era literature, horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, and the romance of Edgar Allan Poe with Providence poet Sarah Helen Whitman.
He founded The Poet’s Press in 1971 in New York City to promote the work of lesser-known poets — the press is still active, both in print and online, and has published 227 books to date, with eight new titles in 2016. The complete catalog of titles and archives of older books can be found at http://www.poetspress.org.
Rutherford attended college first at Edinboro State College (now Edinboro University) in Pennsylvania, and continued his studies many years later at University of Rhode Island, where he completed a masters degree in 2007. Until 2015 he worked for University of Rhode Island as coordinator of distance learning, and as a part-time instructor in the Gender and Women’s Studies program. As a board member of The Providence Athenaeum, he chaired the Philbrick Poetry Prize committee for six years. In 2015, he retired from URI and relocated, with The Poet’s Press, to the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.
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