About the Café
Writing can be a solitary art. Whether you are a Writing major or are simply deeply interested in writing, you can find an informal community of Pitt writers at the Writers' Café. Make contacts with other writers, try your hand at different genres, let guided freewriting exercises jumpstart your process, and share feedback on works-in-progress with peers from all over campus. At the Writers' Café, you'll get leads on publishing opportunities and contests and enjoy a supportive environment for trying out your work on new readers and listeners.
Sessions are held on various Friday afternoons from 3:30-5:30 and are facilitated by practicing creative writers, often from the Pitt faculty. Typical sessions include craft talks, writing in response to prompts, and sharing that writing. Start your weekend the "write" way by being part of the Writers' Café.
Writers’ Café sessions are held in a mix of zoom and in-person sessions; see details below for each café.
The Writing Center has a number of creative writing faculty on staff as tutors, and you are ALWAYS WELCOME to get one-on-one feedback on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by making an appointment at the Writing Center.
If you have questions, contact April Flynn or Sarah Leavens, the Writers' Café coordinators, via email or at 412-624-6556.
Spring 2025 Sessions:
January 24: Richard Hamilton
Formal Constraints and Slippage
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Ballads, Blues, Sonnets, & Haikus—The role of aesthetics, formal constraints and slippage in poetry. In this craft talk, we will read and discuss poems that help us think about landscape—structure, subject, tone, sonic and rhetorical registers, voice, and audience. Received and popular art forms take numeration or counting as one of the single most important ways poems or songs “mean.” How might discrete and personal, cultural and linguistic material imbricate or overlap to extend the poem’s field of knowledge? Where evident, we will identify ways poets slip the yoke of formal expectations. Together I hope we can discover things uniquely fundamental about our writing.
Richard Hamilton (he/they) was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and raised in the American south. He received an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama and an MA in Arts and Politics from New York University. Hamilton is the author of Rest of Us (Re-Center Press, 2021) and Discordant (Autumn House Press, 2023). He has received fellowships and awards from Oscar William and Gene Derwood, the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, the Cave Canem foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, among others. He holds the 2023-2025 post-doctoral creative writing fellowship at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.
February 14: Joy Priest
Literary Mapping: Writing a Specific Place
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
In this session we’ll explore “world-building” and the spatial mapping of a city or a region. We’ll look at how the settings from which we write or write about are informed by specific image systems, colloquial speech, and cultural forms, and we’ll discuss the social implications of re-mapping and re-narrativizing a place. Our focus is the real and imagined literary places in our work and their relationship to our memories, experiences, and identities.
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is the recipient of an Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ESPN and Sewanee Review, among others. Joy received her PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and she is on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and the Curator of Community Programs & Practice at Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry & Poetics (CAAPP).
March 28: Dave Newman
Your Job is Your Story
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
(Almost) everyone must hold a job. That’s a bummer for writers who usually make their livings in ways other than writing and would rather spend their time working on their art. What to do about the endless hours we spend making a living? Write about it! In this session, we will discuss all the ways a steady job can be used as material to make art. Poem. Short story. Essay. Novel. Memoir. A job offers endless possibilities for material. Your job is your setting. Your job is your characters. Your job is your speaker, is your narrator, is your whole story. We will discuss short works by Lucia Berlin (fiction), Chris Llewellyn (poetry), Etheridge Knight (poetry), and Beth Ann Fennelly (essay). Then we will write our own narratives in whatever form the narrative wants.
Dave Newman is the author of nine books, including the story collection She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall (Roadside Press, 2024), the memoir The Same Dead Songs (J.New Books, 2023), and How to Live Like Li Po in Pittsburgh: essays from a writing life (J.New Books, 2024). His collection The Slaughterhouse Poems was named one of the best books of the year by L Magazine. He appeared in the PBS documentary narrated by Rick Sebak about Pittsburgh writers. Winner of numerous awards, including the Andre Dubus Novella Prize and the Rattle Readers' Choice Award, he lives in Trafford, PA, the last town in the Electric Valley, with his wife, the writer Lori Jakiela. After a decade of working in medical research at the VA in Pittsburgh, he currently teaches writing at Pitt-Greensburg, his alma mater.
April 11: LeTriece Calhoun
Compositional Conjuration: Writing through experience, emotion, and memory
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
This session asks, explores, and questions how the act of writing is an act of conjuration—the action of “bringing forth.” What does it mean to relive a moment of power, of grief, or joy? How does the process of writing call upon past experience to shape, or focus, the meaning of the present? The prompts and discussion for this session focus on pulling out the magic within memory and experience.
LeTriece Calhoun is a scholar-conjurer hailing from North Carolina and is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing focuses on Black materiality, experimental composition, and archival conjuring.
Fall 2024 Sessions:
December 6: Cedric Rudolph
Imagination’s Tools: Reading and Writing Childhood
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Perhaps—with the incessant demands of adult life—you have lost contact with your inner child. Yet you bottled somewhere your awe for fireflies, your passion for action figures, your obsession with orange highlighters. Much of reviving naiveté is about giving shape and word to what is otherwise intangible, trying to recapture how children experience their surroundings as they move through them. In this workshop, we will explore how other writers have written their own childhoods and childhoods for their fictional characters. What choices do they make to convey convincingly a child’s inner world?
We’ll also engage in prompts to access our own playfulness.
Cedric Rudolph is a Black, gay writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He works as a Visiting Lecturer for the University of Pittsburgh’s Writing Department. He has also taught for the Institute for Anti-Racist Education and led workshops in Allegheny County Jail. His publications include Christianity and Literature Journal, The Laurel Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Guidebook, and The Coal Hill Review. Most recently, Eavesdrop Magazine awarded him third place in their Queer Joy Contest.
November 8: Sherrie Flick
Fractured Memories: Exploring the Concept of Home
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
What is home? Is it a place? A feeling? Is it where you grew up or is it where you feel most comfortable being you? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. In this Writers’ Café session we’ll think (and write) deeply about the idea of home and see how it connects to memory and setting. It’s an elusive idea, even though it seems simple.
Through generative writing exercises we’ll work on replicating home on the page in both a factual way and through emotion. We’ll work against nostalgia and within scene in order to try and replicate memory on the page.
Sherrie Flick received a 2023 Creative Development Award from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist was published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2024 as part of their American Lives series. Her other works include, Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel. Autumn House Press will publish her third story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, in April 2025. She will serve as the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College.
September 27: Jonathan Callard
Hearing Voices, Making Choices: Writing Community Out of Your Comfort Zone
3:30-5:30pm, Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor
To convey complications of places less familiar to you, not your own, we’ll focus on how writers can use voice—the voices heard in an environment as well as your own voice on the page through sentence length and rhythm, language and word choice, punctuation. How might our choices with voice speak to insider and outsider points of view, to multiple perspectives in this community we’re encountering? When I taught writing to three Pitt students, their voices on the page drew me to their high school football team and hometown, which has now led to a nonfiction project on that place and its people. Through examining and discussing excerpts from that project—read them here and here—and playing with voice through writing exercises, we’ll explore decisions we can make to speak to something bigger than ourselves and have time to share our work.
Jonathan Callard teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. His nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, PublicSource, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Image, Creative Nonfiction, Pittsburgh Magazine, the Dallas Morning News, and elsewhere. The winner of the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, he has received writing fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. In addition to his duties at Pitt, where he has been recognized as “Most Valuable Professor” for his work with student athletes, he has taught for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation and mentors writers individually. He is currently working on a book about family and football.
Recent Past Sessions:
"Writing the Bodymind: Locating the Story Within the Self" with Jessie Male
Writing is often identified as an embodied practice, but what does it mean to write embodiment, to translate the experiences of the bodymind onto the page? Through a series of prompts and engagement with sample texts, participants will explore ways to write the lived experience evocatively and tangibly, to engage with sensory description to develop characters (including the self as character) that feel and move in complex—often messy—ways. Prompts will be complemented by discussion on what it means to write what is deemed "beyond language," and on how writing the bodymind can be an act of resistance against imposed notions of "appropriate" or idealized ways of being.
Jessie Male is the Postdoctoral Associate in Disability Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a PhD in English from Ohio State and an MFA in memoir from Hunter College. Her creative writing, interdisciplinary, and academic scholarhsip appears in Guernica, BOMB Magazine, Lateral, Palaver Journal, Constellations, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Writing, among many other print and online publications. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation Disability Memoir: A Study in Pedagogy and Practice.
"Syntax and Surprise" with Barbara Edelman and Ellen McGrath Smith
Good writing is full of surprises—from unexpected imagery to plot twists to seemingly out-of-the-blue word choices. At the level of the sentence, writers often surprise both themselves and their readers by throwing a wrench into the workings of syntax. Sometimes, it's a verb in the place of a noun or a noun where a verb should be. Sometimes a sentence does a flip-turn, or one word spins off from another. What do such surprises make possible? How can we keep ourselves open to these swerves while we compose and revise our work? This session will present great examples of syntactical shake-ups from poetry and prose—along with exercises that invite you to torque your syntax in ways that stop, even jaw-drop, your readers.
Barbara Edelman’s poetry collections include All the Hanging Wrenches (longlisted by Publisher’s Weekly as a notable book of poetry for 2022) and Dream of the Gone-From City (2017), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press; and the chapbooks Exposure (Finishing Line Press) and A Girl in Water (Parallel Press). Her poems and short prose have appeared in Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Raleigh Review, Rattle, and Spillway, among other journals, and in several anthologies. A professor emerita and current part time instructor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Edelman has taught courses in creative writing, literature, and composition.
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lamb was released in January 2023 from Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.
"Ars Cinema" with Xan Phillips
What can we as poets learn from non-verbal modes of storytelling? This workshop will explore image building by testing the relationship between poetics and cinematography. If you have ever been curious about the ekphrastic mode (writing in response to art), sampling, or experimental poetry this class will serve as a gateway into those creative endeavors. This session will include a dynamic discussion about a brief curated selection of poetry and film, with ample time to write and share work.
Xan Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. He has received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Find him online at xanphillips.com.