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.
If you would like to suggest yourself or someone you know (who currently lives in Pittsburgh) for inclusion in this directory, please email us with a biographical sketch, and any relevant website and social links.
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Kelly Scarff
Biography
Kelly Scarff is an editor and a graphic designer who lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She also teaches English at a local university. Her first chapbook, I Fall in Love with Strangers, is available from Liquid Paper Press; her second chapbook, Mother Russia, is forthcoming from Kattywompus Press. Her poems have been published in various poetry journals, and you can find her tweeting about fruit flies on her Twitter handle, @kscarff.
Daniel M. Shapiro
Biography
Daniel M. Shapiro is the author of How the Potato Chip Was Invented (sunnyoutside press, 2013), a collection of celebrity-centered poems. His work has been featured in numerous online and print journals. He is a poetry editor of Pittsburgh Poetry Review and interviews poets online at Little Myths.
Fred Shaw
Biography
Fred Shaw is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, and Carlow University, where he received his MFA. He teaches writing and literature at Point Park University and Carlow University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of the chapbook, Argot (Finishing Line Press). His poems have been published in 5AM, Poet Lore, Briar Cliff Review, Permafrost, SLAB, Spry Literary Magazine, Floodwall, Nerve Cowboy, Mason’s Road, Shaking Like A Mountain, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Pittsburgh City Paper, where he currently reviews books. In a parallel life, he has also worked in the service industry for the past twenty-five years. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and rescued hound dog.
Scott Silsbe
Biography
Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Pittsburgh, where he writes and works for Caliban Bookshop. His poems and prose have appeared in numerous print and web periodicals including Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, The Chariton Review, Third Coast, The Volta, and the Cultural Weekly. He is the author of two poetry collections: Unattended Fire (Six Gallery Press, 2012) and The River Underneath the City (Low Ghost Press, 2013).
Ellen McGrath Smith
Biography
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron, and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and the forthcoming Rabbit Ears. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her book, tentatively titled Nobody’s Jackknife, will be published in fall 2015 by the West End Press. Her fiction has appeared in Weave, Thumbnail, Switchback, Kestrel, and other journals, and her critical work on women writers, craft, and poetic form has appeared in Sagetrieb, Talking Writing, Cerise; an article on the public poetics of Adrienne Rich is forthcoming in Voice, Vision, Politics, and Performance in the Poetics of Adrienne Rich and Jayne Cortez: Feminist Superheroes in Conversation (Lexington Books).
Richard St. John
Biography
Richard St. John is a nationally-published poet whose collections include Book of Entangled Souls (Broadstone Books, 2022), Each Perfected Name (Truman State University Press, 2015), The Pure Inconstancy of Grace (published in 2005 by Truman State University Press, as first runner-up for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry), and Shrine (a long poem released as a chapbook in 2011).
His work has also appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies. He has read widely across the country, connecting not only with literary audiences but with listeners new to poetry. You can hear or read some of Rick’s poems, presentations and reviews by clicking Media.
To schedule a reading or class visit, or to contact Rick, please click Let’s Connect.
Christine Stroud
Biography
Christine Stroud was raised in North Carolina, but currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA. In March 2014 her chapbook The Buried Return was released by Finishing Line Press. She works as the Senior Editor of Autumn House Press.
John Stupp
Biography
John Stupp is the author of the 2007 Main Street Rag chapbook The Blue Pacific and the 2015 full-length collection Advice from the Bed of a Friend (also by Main Street Rag). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, Chelsea, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, 5 AM, The Pennsylvania Review, Prism International and other regional magazines. He has lived and worked in various states as a jazz musician, university instructor, taxi driver, radio news writer, waiter, auto factory laborer and paralegal. He now lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Bette and his dog Buster. When not writing John can be found fishing in South Carolina.
Philip Terman
Biography
Philip Terman’s most recent books of poetry are Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press) and Like a Bird Entering a Window and Leaving Through Another Window, a hand-sewn collaboration with an artist and bookbinder. A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka, has been translated into Arabic and published by Ninawa Press. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Sun Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. His poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily. He teaches at Clarion University, is co-director of The Chautauqua Writers Festival, and directs the Bridge Literary Arts Center in Franklin, PA. His poetry can be found on the sculptor James Simon’s mosaic, “Musicians,” at the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry. Occasionally, he performs his poetry with the jazz band, Catro.
Read three poems by Philip Terman on Littsburgh:
Robert Walicki
Biography
Robert Walicki is the curator of VERSIFY, a monthly reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in a number of journals including, HEArt, Stone Highway Review, Uppagus, The Kentucky Review, Grasslimb, and on the radio show Prosody. He won 1st runner up in the 2013 Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition and was awarded finalist in the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. He currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015). He lives in Verona, PA with his wife, Lynne, and two cats.
Don Wentworth
Biography
Don Wentworth is a Pittsburgh-based poet whose work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life. His poetry has appeared in Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, bear creek haiku, Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Rolling Stone, as well as a number of anthologies. His first full-length collection, Past All Traps, was published in 2011 by Six Gallery Press and was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation’s 2011 ‘Touchstone Distinguished Books Award.’ His poem “hiding” was selected as one of “100 Notable Haiku” of 2013 by Modern Haiku Press. A second full-length book, Yield to the Willow, is now available from Six Gallery Press. Two new books, from Low Ghost and Six Gallery Press respectively, are forthcoming. For the last 26 years, he has edited the small press magazine, Lilliput Review.
Issa’s Untidy Hut: http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/
Lilliput Review homepage: https://sites.google.com/site/lilliputreview/home
Christine Aikens Wolfe
Biography
Formerly a reading specialist for Pittsburgh Public Schools, Christine writes and teaches the craft of writing to children and adults. Christine co-edited The Poetic Classroom (Autumn House, 2013) and appears in an anthology of formalist poets writing in five languages: The Phoenix Rising from Ashes (2014). She has published poems in Sonnetto Poesia, a bi-lingual quarterly out of Ottawa, and in Poetry Magazine, Loyalhanna Review, Blast Furnace, City Paper, and more. She was one of twenty poets featured in the anthology Fission and Form, where poetry linked the work of sculptors and illustrators.
Christine is a member of Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, and Pittsburgh Poetry Society, of which she is currently President.
Michael Wurster
Biography
Michael Wurster has lived in Pittsburgh since 1964 and is a founding member of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. For 17 years, 1993-2010, he taught at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts School. In 2009, his book, The British Detective, was published by Main Street Rag. His two previous poetry collections are The Cruelty of the Desert (Cottage Wordsmiths, 1989) and The Snake Charmer’s Daughter (ELEMENOPE, 2000). He is co-editor, with Judith R. Robinson, of the anthology, Along These Rivers: Poetry & Photography from Pittsburgh (Quadrant Press, 2008), and The Brentwood Anthology (Lummox Press, 2014). In 1996, Wurster was an inaugural recipient of a Pittsburgh Magazine Harry Schwalb Excellence in the Arts Award for his contributions to poetry and the community.
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