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| Ed Orchester | |
Ed Ochester, poet, teacher, and longtime series editor of the University of Pittsburgh's Pitt Poetry Series, died last Tuesday, August 22. He was 83.
Ochester joined the University of Pittsburgh in 1970, chairing the creative writing program for more than two decades and serving as editor of the Pitt Poetry Series from 1978 to 2021. When Ochester inherited the series, he sought to broaden the scope of American poetry, publishing women poets, poets of color, and queer poets at a time when there was little diversity to be found in poetry publishing. Ochester became a driving force of American poetry, working with poets Richard Blanco, Ross Gay, Reginald Shepherd, and Jan Beatty. Under his leadership, books in the series have won or been finalists for such prizes as the National Book Award, the National Books Critic Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. At the University of Pittsburgh Press, Ochester established the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize in 1981 and was the editor of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
He also wrote more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Sugar Run Road, Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, The Land of Cockaigne, Cooking in Key West, and Changing the Name to Ochester. His work has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. For his contributions to the arts, he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006, and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award in 2001. He twice served as the president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and was on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars for more than a decade following his retirement from Pitt. He was also a cofounder of the poetry journal 5AM.
The current series editors of the Pitt Poetry Series--Terrance Hayes, Nancy Krygowski, and Jeffrey McDaniel--said, "As the new Pitt Poetry Series editors, having taken up Ed's role this past spring, we will be doubling our efforts to bring attention to all Ed Ochester did for us, Pitt poets, and contemporary poetry. His role in the career of poets such as Sharon Olds, Toi Derricotte, Billy Collins, Etheridge Knight, and countless others makes him easily one of the most significant poetry editors of the last 50 years."