A heavy stack sits in my hands but the true burden is elsewhere. The thin paper is curled at the edges, a fresh, virgin-white newspaper not yet yellowed by time's cruel curse. It...

Our dusty dictionary sits unused on the bottom shelf of the five-level mahogany bookcase. Once important for teaching us children the words we didn't know yet, it filled our dirty hands, as...

My lover is like a cactus. His prickly spines deter others. He lives in the dry desert room, surrounded by sand, under the hot sun. I wish I could visit him, but I am planted in a different room. I am...

The bumping and bouncing beat of rap music filled Nordy’s Place Saturday evening as students snapped and clapped along to live music and slam poetry. G Yamazawa rapidly spit lyrics rooted in personal...

Emiola Jay Oriola said he’s not native to writing poetry — and he didn’t used to like art — but in the eulogy he wrote for his father’s funeral, he found that a poem came out. “It was very...

I remember the first time a line of poetry caught me by surprise. I was sitting in the Cathedral of Learning mouthing the words of Ross Gay’s poem “catalog of unabashed gratitude” to myself. The...

Sarah Thornton stands in the basement of the Frick Fine Arts Center, preparing for her work to appear in an exhibit Tuesday night. She dips her fingers in paint and presses them to the canvas, using gray...

With the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Dawn Lundy Martin wants to make Pitt the place people go to study black poetry. “We want to help to really put that MFA program on the map so...