Ilja Nieuwland is the author of American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus. He is a historian of science–in particular paleontology–attached to the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. American Dinosaur Abroad covers the discovery in 1899 of the Diplodocus carnegii—or Dippy, as it’s known today—by a team of paleontologists sponsored by Andrew Carnegie. Then the longest and largest dinosaur on record, the Diplodocus skeleton was replicated into plaster casts that were gifted to different nations by Carnegie in the years leading up to World War I. In this largely untold history, Nieuwland…

Kate Wisel of Monona, Wisconsin, is the 2019 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a book of short stories. Her manuscript Driving in Cars with Homeless Men was selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee from a field of over 530 entries. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press later this year. “You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages,” said Lee. “Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are…

Ryan Black of Jackson Heights, NY is the 2018 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The University of Pittsburgh Press and Pitt Poetry Series will published his collection, “The Tenant of Fire” in fall 2019. Black will also receive a $5,000 cash prize. In explaining his inspiration behind the collection, Black states: “Kirk Semple, a New York Times metro reporter, described Queens, NY, as a “petri dish for what our increasingly diverse and heterogeneous nation is becoming.” The Tenant of Fire is about Queens—its history, both public and personal, real and imagined—and mines the complex, often contradictory, lived…

Pittsburgh is more than just a home for author Kathleen George: the city and its people are a source of inspiration. A native of Johnstown, George has lived in the city for many years, teaches theatre arts and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and has written several novels and short stories based in the Pittsburgh region, including The Johnstown Girls. Her latest, The Blues Walked In, is a period fiction novel set against the backdrop of Pittsburgh’s once-bustling Hill District. It’s 1936, and a nineteen year-old Lena Horne is walking to her father’s hotel in the Hill after a long tour with Nobel Sissel’s orchestra. Along the…

Poem from the Vault aims to celebrate our diverse poetic history by highlighting backlist poetry from the Pitt Poetry Series. Ed Ochester has been the editor and creative force behind the series since 1978. We kick off Black History Month with a selection from Toi Derricotte’s 1989 collection, Captivity.   © 1989 Toi Derricotte from Captivity What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The…