Our faculty, students, and alumni are highly active in the literary community. We're proud to host and sponsor a number of ambitious projects within the writing program.
Aster(ix) is a transnational feminist literary arts journal committed to social justice and translation, placing women of color at the center of the conversation. Aster(ix) is proud to publish both emerging and established writers, creating and nurturing a space for voices, stories, and ideas that may not otherwise find a home. The journal publishes digitally throughout the year and 2-3 times in-print. Founded in 2013 by novelist Angie Cruz and nonfiction writer Adriana E. Ramírez, Aster(ix) loves to feature the intimate, the honest, and the beautiful.
From its beginning in 2016, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics has been a creative think tank for African American and African diasporic poetries and poetics. CAAPP's mission is to highlight, promote, and share the work of African American and African diasporic poets and to pollinate cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration. Their programming aims to present exciting live poetry and conversation, contextualize the meaning of that work, and archive it for future generations.
For over two decades, the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series has sought to make central to the intellectual endeavors of the university the study of creative writing. PCWS brings notable writers to Pitt’s main campus every year. Thanks to funding from the office of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, the series is free and open to the public and features contemporary writers with extraordinary talent in fiction, non-fiction and poetry, who also work directly with our MFA in Creative Writing students. Writers who have visited in the past include George Saunders, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gay Talese, Richard Ford, John Edgar Wideman, John McPhee, Dan Chaon, Lucille Clifton, Anne Carson, Mark Doty, and Michael Ondaatje, among others.
Our City
Read more about why the City of Pittsburgh has been called “America’s Most Livable City” as well as “the perfect city for writers.”
Community Resources
Learn more about the extensive literary resources and support available locally.