Where to Admire & Create Poetry in Pgh

Whether you want to celebrate your family, friends, lovers, or your longest and most important relationship with yourself this Valentine’s Day, do it by using the language of the heart: poetry.

🏡 On Display
Along Woodwell Street in Squirrel Hill, you can see the latest art installation by landscape architect Ntalie Plecity — a stanza of Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” stretches from house to house in big, bold letters: “But one thing is certain: If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy, and change our children’s birthright.”

🎤 On the Mic

• Story Club Pittsburgh hosts a monthly nonfiction storytelling series at City of Asylum on the North Side. The next event, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” is from 7 to 8:30 on Feb. 28. (Stay tuned for City of Asylum’s Jazz & Poetry month in May.)
• Steel City Slam is hosting 412 SLAM tomorrow from 7 to 10 p.m. at The PA Market in the Strip District.
• Keep a lookout for literature events at local bookshops, like this Thursday’s free virtual Poetry Book Party with White Whale Bookstore.

📚 (Read) On the Page

• Carnegie Library has a handy list of poets whose work is informed by Pittsburgh: “Whether the influence is obvious or more subtle, the crucial worlds that they spin with their words have the power to evoke these landscapes we live in every day.”
• “Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose” is a collection that reflects on the questions, “What does it mean to live in one of the ‘most livable’ cities? Who benefits? Whose experiences are often ignored?” It’s a creative culmination of workbetween 11 multilingual, multiply disabled, and multiply abled Pittsburgh writers and 11 Pittsburghers with disabilities.
• Listen to our podcast interview with college student, poet, and archivist Silas Maxwell Switzer where he talks about documenting the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh, along with its erasure, in a new chapbook titled "Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach.”

📝 (Write) On the Page

• The Pittsburgh Poetry Collective hosts virtual events where you can write, share, or just listen, like Open Studio at 7:45 p.m. on Feb. 28or Pgh Poetry & Pints.
• If you have creative youth in your life, tell them about Write Pittsburgh’s literary magazine “Starry False Lily.” Poetry submissions are now open.
• Write Pittsburgh also hosts a variety of writing workshops for kids and adults.