A celebration of the life and work of Ed Ochester, former editor of the Pitt Poetry Series, will take place at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 12 in Alumni Hall’s Connelly Ballroom.
The event will be emceed by former Pitt Poetry Series co-editor Terrance Hayes and will feature readings, remembrances and a discussion with some of luminaries of American poetry and the Pitt Poetry Series under Ochester’s editorship: Quan Barry, Jan Beatty, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Ross Gay, Paisley Rekdal, and Aaron Smith. The event is free and open to the public.
The celebration is being hosted by the University of Pittsburgh Press, the Pitt Poetry Series, and the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh’s Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, the Department of English, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the Pitt Writing Program and the International Poetry Forum.
On Sept.13, there also will be a series of events on the Oakland campus that feature discussions and panels involving the same group of poets. Check with the Pitt Press for more details.
Ochester served as the editor and creative force of the Pitt Poetry Series for nearly 40 years and for nearly 20 years was the director of Pitt’s Writing Program. He passed away in August 2023.
Under Ochester’s leadership, books in the series have been recognized as winners or finalists for the National Book Award, the Leonore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN America Jean Stein Book Award, and many others.
Ochester was professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh and on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. In 2001, he received Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s Creative Achievement Award. He authored numerous poetry collections, including “Sugar Run Road,” “Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New” and “The Republic of Lies,” and was editor of American Poetry Now.