About Us

We’re poets in the Pittsburgh area who gather twice a month at the Squirrel Hill branch of Carnegie Library to discuss our work. Our membership has varied over the years and has included a kindergarten teacher, a salesman, editors, a science writer, high school teachers, college professors, an architect, a retired biochemist. Currently, we’re 16 people, men and women, with varied backgrounds in writing and literature.

We represent a diversity of viewpoints and poetic styles — personal confessionalism, New York school whimsy, archetypal mythology, neo-surrealism, Whitmanesque expansion, Dickinsonian concision. We share love for poetry and the multitude of voices it brings into being.

Among us, we’ve published in many journals, including 5 AM, Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Heart, Main Street Rag, Negative Capability, Poetry, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Poet Lore, Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Slipstream, Sycamore Review, yawp and many others. Some of us teach writing classes and lead our own workshops.

We’ve read and performed our poems publicly in most of the poetry venues in the Pittsburgh region. And we’ve read in other states, recently including Kentucky and the District of Columbia, and in Canada, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Athens and Bratislava. Many of us have been interviewed on radio, including the BBC.

At least once a year, we try to hold a joint reading in various parts of Pittsburgh.

Want to hold a reading? Please let us know: info@squirrelhillpoets.org