Following a long, distinguished career as a poet, teacher, and editor, Ed Ochester, series editor and creative force behind the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press, has retired. Ochester took over the Pitt Poetry Series in 1978 and has published hundreds of collections by established and rising poets. When Ochester inherited the series, he sought to broaden the scope of what American poetry looked like, publishing women poets, queer poets, and poets of color at a time when there was little diversity to be found in the poetry publishing realm. Ochester became a driving force of American…

The winner of this year’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Now You Know It All by Joanna Pearson, is a masterful act of storytelling. Poised on the precipice of mystery and longing, each character in Now You Know It All also hovers on the brink of discovery—and decision. Set in small-town North Carolina, or featuring eager Southerners venturing afar, these stories capture the crucial moment of irrevocable change. A young waitress accepts an offer from a beguiling stranger; a troubled boy attempts to unleash the villain from an internet hoax on his party guests; a smitten student finds more than she…

Books in the Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment series address the intersecting relationships between the built environment and a range of cultural forces, exploring the ways buildings, cities, and landscapes impact—and are in turn shaped by—the formulation and function of deep social, economic, and political structures. They also examine the agency of the built environment as it actively helps to shape class, race, and gender identities. These books are notable for their innovative topics and approaches. The scope of the series is international and open to multidisciplinary work, but it is primarily focused on publishing spatial histories that have…

The University of Pittsburgh Press is pleased to welcome Jorge Coronado as the new series editor for Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas! Featuring cutting-edge books on Latin American and inter-American societies, histories, and cultures that offer new perspectives from postcolonial, subaltern, feminist, and cultural studies, this series takes its inspiration from the idea of the illumination, which the critic Walter Benjamin defined as “that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to someone singled out by history at a moment of danger.” By emphasizing this recovery of the past in the context of a perilous present, the series concerns…

The University of Pittsburgh Press is thrilled to announce Be Holding, the fourth book of poetry from Bloomington, Indiana-based poet and writer Ross Gay, is the winner of the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award. Published in UPP’s Pitt Poetry Series, Be Holding is the first book published by a university press to win the prestigious Jean Stein Prize. “I think this book is so much not only this desire, but this practice. The practice being understanding that we are made of each other. . . . I want to honor the mycelial way poems are made. But not…