The International Poetry Forum’s “Poets-in-Person” outreach program began with a workshop by Gerald Barrax at Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse High School on September 28, 1966. Early support for the initiative came from the National Endowment for the Arts, the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Over the past half century, Poets-in-Person has existed in a variety of iterations, hosting hundreds of visiting and local poets to offer seminars and workshops at high schools across the Greater Pittsburgh region. Participating poets and educators have included legends like Fred Rogers, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Martín Espada, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

In 2009, the International Poetry Forum went on hiatus after the retirement of our founder, Samuel Hazo. Fifteen years later, the Forum’s reading series and Poets-in-Person program resumed with a workshop for Westinghouse Arts students by National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes.

From 2024, the International Poetry Forum once again supports free school visits to encourage a love of poetry and to educate students about Pittsburgh’s role as one of our country’s literary capitals.

If you are a high school teacher in Allegheny County interested in having a poet visit your classroom, please contact our director, Jake Grefenstette, at director@internationalpoetryforum.org. Sessions run 1 to 1.5 hours and typically include a short reading and talk on one or two poems (usually by Forum alumni); a writing prompt based on this work; and an opportunity for students to present and discuss their own poems.

If you are interested in further tools for classroom use, you can visit the digital archives of the International Poetry Forum, which offer one of the most significant collections of poetry recordings in the world.