We look forward to seeing you at our Spring 2026 sessions!
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 free-writing exercises jumpstart your process, and share feedback on works-in-progress with peers from all over campus. At the Writers' Café, you'll 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 person in the Writing Center; we offer light refreshments such as tea, coffee, soda, and individually packaged snacks.
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 2026 Sessions:
February 13: Snapshots and Track Lists: Poems as Artifacts with Andrea Janov
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
This workshop invites you to write poems that begin with a moment, a photo, a song, or an object that quietly holds your history—your lore, your story. We’ll approach poems as artifacts, much like photographs, mixtapes, or scrapbook pages, each preserving a lived moment through close attention and concrete detail. Discussion will focus on capturing a single moment, developing it through sensory detail, and learning how framing—what to include and omit—shapes meaning. Each part of the workshop will build on the last, moving from draft to depth to structure, and finally pulling the pieces together into something larger. You’re welcome to stay with a single poem and revise it through each prompt, or to draft new work along the way, allowing the poems to speak to one another as a growing collection.
Andrea Janov believes in the beauty of the ordinary, the power of the vernacular, and the history of the abandoned. Her work reveals the art in what we see, say, do, ignore, and forget every day. She has two collections out in the world, Mix Tapes and Photo Albums and Short Skirts and Whiskey Shots (Earth Island Books).
February 27: Writing with Others with Elina Zhang and Jenna Peng
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Elina Zhang is writer, artist, and organizer based in Pittsburgh. Her writing circles the present feeling, interspecies relationships, and life-giving desire. As the purveyor and editor of the anonymous gossip tabloid THE SHEET, she wants to know what your latest gossip is.
Jenna Peng is a writer who wants to be an artist. She writes poetry and criticism, often both at the same time. Her writing circles otherness, closeness, and aloneness, compelled-repelled by the kinds of things we do to-for each other. She indulges in writing about writing, thinking about thinking, not knowing about knowing, and is in search of a Center for Stray Thought. Across her practices, she is intent on learning how to play well with others.
Jenn E. Zhang is a collective made up of Jenna Peng and Elina Zhang. She has curated Read-Shifting Web, an Asian diasporic reading room, and taught Anti-Ante-Auntie-Seminars, writing workshops in tandem with art shows.
March 27: Ren Fuller
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
This Cafe is a collaboration with Autumn House Press.
April 10: Chrissy Bloom
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Fall 2025 Sessions:
September 12: Jan Beatty
Poetry in Everyday Stories: Celebrating the Empathy of Ed Ochester
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
This Cafe is a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Press and Celebration of Ed Ochester. Find more information here.
There is great humanity in the people and situations we run into every day, and often these small meetings go unspoken. With writing prompts and examples of some poems, we’ll focus on the use of understatement, concrete detail, and dialogue in the brilliant work of Ed Ochester. We’ll discover the emotion that rises from unexpected moments. We’ll share our writing in a welcoming and supportive space, as we receive feedback. This workshop is open to all levels of writers.
Jan Beatty's work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, POETRY, and Best American Poetry. In 2024, her eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She was featured in POETRY magazine in December, 2024. Beatty is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard. She worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the international low-residency MFA program. Learn more about Jan's work here.
October 3: Jason Kuo
Writing Through Blocks with Play and Monsters
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Writing can be hard, especially now. This session, focused on the personal essay and memoir writing, will offer prompts and generative exercises to approach personal and creative writing projects with a renewed sense of play. We will learn ‘warm-up’ exercises to facilitate a creative headspace for writing sessions to work through blocks. We will also learn oblique approaches to recast memories as characters, with which we can engage on the page in new and exciting ways. Mostly, we will try to have fun.
Jason Kuo is a writer and attorney, currently in his 3rd year in the nonfiction MFA program at Pitt. He is interested in cults, corporations and meaning making.
October 17: Jasmine Reid
Ecstatic Grief: Writing Radical Futures
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
This Cafe is a collaboration with the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) at Pitt and Autumn House Press. Find information about the Interlocuter Goddess Book Launch event on October 17 here.
Poets make sense in the wounds. The line breaks the historical, social, and personal open—:pregnant with music and possibility. Trans Atlantic. Dia Sporic.
In this writers' cafe, we will write to our beloved persons, homelands, and horizons, transfigure loss with historicity and futurity. We'll write from the wound of the old world to the womb of a new one struggling to be born!
Participants will be provided with prompts and poems which exemplify the above-outlined task, along with open, generative space to share their work. The writer's cafe is open to all levels of writers.
Jasmine Reid is a poet for the people and the author of Interlocutor Goddess, winner of the 2024 CAAPP Poetry Prize, and Deus Ex Nigrum (2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, The Jerome Foundation, and Poets House, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, among others. She was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a community organizer and an assistant professor at New York University. Learn more about Jasmine's work here.
November 14: Fred Shaw
Poetry is People: Writing Character into Verse
3:30-5:30pm in the Writing Center, O'Hara Student Center 3rd floor.
Poetry strives to illuminate and illustrate the human condition. As writers, we often look inward, using the self as filter to understand the world of experience. By writing characters into our poems, we can extend our understanding of humanity by considering those whose orbits we cross in our daily lives and how they can leave a lasting impression on our work. Through examples and writing prompts, we’ll explore character development through voice, characterization, figurative language and “ventriloquism.” We’ll strive to find how the people who inhabit our lives can inhabit our poems, bringing a new dynamic and even greater sense of empathy to our lines and stanzas.
Fred Shaw is a Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh and was recently named to the Advisory Board for the International Poetry Forum. His first collection, Scraping Away was published by CavanKerry Press in 2020. A second book is in the works.
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.