Whether you want to celebrate your family, friends, lovers, or your longest and most important relationship with yourself this Valentine’s Day, do it by using the language of the heart: poetry.
🏡 On Display
Along Woodwell Street in Squirrel Hill, you can see the latest art installation by landscape architect Ntalie Plecity — a stanza of Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” stretches from house to house in big, bold letters: “But one thing is certain: If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy, and change our children’s birthright.”
🎤 On the Mic
- Story Club Pittsburgh hosts a monthly nonfiction storytelling series at City of Asylum on the North Side. The next event, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” is from 7 to 8:30 on Feb. 28. (Stay tuned for City of Asylum’s Jazz & Poetry month in May.)
- Steel City Slam is hosting 412 SLAM tomorrow from 7 to 10 p.m. at The PA Market in the Strip District.
- Keep a lookout for literature events at local bookshops, like this Thursday’s free virtual Poetry Book Party with White Whale Bookstore.
📚 (Read) On the Page
- Carnegie Library has a handy list of poets whose work is informed by Pittsburgh: “Whether the influence is obvious or more subtle, the crucial worlds that they spin with their words have the power to evoke these landscapes we live in every day.”
- “Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose” is a collection that reflects on the questions, “What does it mean to live in one of the ‘most livable’ cities? Who benefits? Whose experiences are often ignored?” It’s a creative culmination of workbetween 11 multilingual, multiply disabled, and multiply abled Pittsburgh writers and 11 Pittsburghers with disabilities.
- Listen to our podcast interview with college student, poet, and archivist Silas Maxwell Switzer where he talks about documenting the AIDS crisis in Pittsburgh, along with its erasure, in a new chapbook titled "Nine Parts Water, One Part Bleach.”
📝 (Write) On the Page
- The Pittsburgh Poetry Collective hosts virtual events where you can write, share, or just listen, like Open Studio at 7:45 p.m. on Feb. 28or Pgh Poetry & Pints.
- If you have creative youth in your life, tell them about Write Pittsburgh’s literary magazine “Starry False Lily.” Poetry submissions are now open.
- Write Pittsburgh also hosts a variety of writing workshops for kids and adults.
