Squirrel Hill
Poetry Workshop
“It is difficult
   to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
   for lack
     of what is found there.”
            — W. C. Williams
Photo of poetry journals

About Us

We’re poets in the Pittsburgh area who gather twice a month at the C.C. Mellor Memorial Library in Edgewood, PA to discuss our work. Our membership has varied over the years and has included a kindergarten teacher, a salesman, editors, a science writer, high school teachers, college professors, an architect, a retired biochemist.

We’re 17 people with varied backgrounds in writing and literature. We represent a diversity of viewpoints and poetic styles — personal confessionalism, New York school whimsy, archetypal mythology, neo-surrealism, Whitmanesque expansion, Dickinsonian concision. We share love for poetry and the multitude of voices it brings into being.

Among us, we’ve published in many journals, including Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Ellipsis, Heart, Main Street Rag, Negative Capability, Poetry, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Poet Lore, Ohio Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Slant, Slipstream, Sycamore Review, yawp and many others. Some of us teach writing classes and lead our own workshops.

We’ve read and performed our poems publicly in most of the poetry venues in the Pittsburgh region. And we’ve read in other states, recently including Kentucky, New Jersey, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia; and in Canada, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Athens and Bratislava. Many of us have been interviewed on radio, including the BBC.

Generally we read in public at least twice: once at the Hemingway's summer poetry reading series, and once in October at C.C. Mellor Library, our kind host.

Want to hold a reading? Please let us know:

Rosaly DeMaios Roffman
4625 Fifth Avenue Apt. 114
Pittsburgh, PA 15213