Lynn Emanuel is celebrating the fall publication of her new volume, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected. We sat down together to learn more about her life and writing process. UPP: Do you remember writing your first poem? How old were you and what was it about? LE: I don’t remember my first poem, although I do remember a line from an early poem. It was about a distant church’s sharp steeple looking like a needle pricking the sky’s blue cloth! I’m not sure what age I was—young enough to be surprised by praise, old enough to be…

Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet for President Obama, has written a special poem, Matters of the Sea / Cosas del Mar, and will read it during the ceremonial reopening of the United States Embassy in Havana, Cuba on August 14, 2015. The Embassy had been closed since 1961. Watch the MSNBC interview with Blanco discussing this historic event. University of Pittsburgh Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Matters of the Sea / Cosas del Mar, a bilingual chapbook that beautifully reproduces poet Blanco’s stirring poem. The expected publication date is September 30, 2015. “Matters of the Sea is one of the most…

July 2015 was a historic month for renewing diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. The U.S. Department of State will officially reopen its embassy in Havana, Cuba on August 14, 2015. The importance of these events can be seen in this statement from Scott Morgenstern, Director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Latin American Studies: “Signified by the July, 2015 reopening of their respective embassies, the Cold War between the United States and Cuba has begun to ease, only 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The regularizing of relations will have profound affects on…

Elsie Henderson, the 101-year-old subject of The Fallingwater Cookbook, often takes the spotlight, but we caught up recently with the author of the book, Suzanne Martinson. Suzanne, a longtime food writer for the P-G, now resides in Washington state. She recently visited Pittsburgh, staying with friends in her old neighborhood of Swan Acres in the North Hills, and was looking for a restaurant for crabcakes, to have lunch with Elsie and cookbook photographer Linda Mitzel. Suzanne’s two grandchildren keep her busy, but she still manages to write a column for the Columbia River Reader in Longview, WA, near her home…

And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry John Hoerr “A fascinating account of USX’s turnabout, during the ’70s and ’80s, from the union’s staunchest ally to its most intransigent foe, and the steelworkers’ struggle to redefine their place in a divided industry.” —New York Times Book Review “An enormous labor of love, John Hoerr’s book comprehensively chronicles a national tragedy.” —The Nation A veteran reporter on American labor, John P. Hoerr analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. And the Wolf Finally Came demonstrates how an obsolete and adversarial…