Pittsburgh, PA –  A celebration of the life and work of Ed Ochester will take place on September 12, 2025 at 7:30pm in the Connelly Ballroom, located in Alumni Hall on the University of Pittsburgh campus. 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 Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), and the Writing Program and the International Poetry Forum.

On Saturday, September 13, 2025, there will also be a series of events on Pitt campus that feature discussions and panels involving the same group of poets. These events will be geared toward writers, students, and anyone interested in learning more about first books, the editorship of Ed Ochester, and an event hosted by CAAPP.

Edwin Frank Ochester served as the editor and creative force of the renowned Pitt Poetry Series for nearly forty years and for nearly twenty years was the director of Pitt’s Writing Program. When Ochester inherited the series, he sought to broaden the scope of what American poetry looked like, publishing women poets, poets of color, and queer poets at a time when there was little diversity to be found in the poetry publishing realm. Ochester became a driving force of American poetry, working with poets Billy Collins, Etheridge Knight, Larry Levis, and Sharon Olds. 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. Ochester has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, where he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006. 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.  He passed away in August 2023.