International Poetry Forum

Hosting more than 800 of the world’s most acclaimed poets and performers between 1966 and 2009, Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum helped to establish the “steel city” as a cynosure of poetry and the arts.

International Poetry Forum founder and director Sam Hazo explains that the goal of the forum was to create a space where “poetry could speak for itself in a public setting.” And for forty-three years, the International Poetry Forum did just that– offering poets and performers from all over the world a place to share their art, and providing poetry enthusiasts a place to nourish their souls—right in the heart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Over the course of its 43-year history, the International Poetry Forum proved to be a priceless gift to the city as well as a boon to the world of poetry. Year after year, the poetry forum attracted world-class poets and performers to its stage. Archibald MacLeish gave the inaugural reading at the International Poetry Forum in 1966, and year after year until 2009, the poetry forum attracted world-class poets to its stage, including W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Naomi Shihab Nye, Linda Pastan, and Joyce Carol Oates. Notable Nobel awardees included Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Saul Bellow, Czeslaw Milosz, and Octavio Paz; Pulitzer Prize winning poets Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, W.S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Penn Warren; U.S. Poet Laureates Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Joseph Brodsky, Charles Simic, Howard Nemerov, Mark Strand, and Donald Hall. Playwright heavyweights Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams and famed novelists Chinua Achebe and Kurt Vonnegut also graced the Forum stage, as did public figures such as Queen Noor of Jordan, Princess Grace of Monaco, and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Many of the world’s most gifted actors and actresses also performed at the Poetry Forum, including Academy Award recipients Anthony Hopkins, Gregory Peck, Sir Peter Ustinov, and Jose Ferrer, Emmy awardee Maureen Stapleton, and Tony Award winner Jessica Tandy. Acclaimed vocalists, musicians, and composers such as Ruby Dee, Dame Cleo Laine, Vivica Genaux, and Gian Carlo Menotti proved to be magnificent crowd-pleasers at the International Poetry Forum—often sharing the stage with promising new poets who were just starting to make a name for themselves.

In 1990, the International Poetry Forum was awarded the James Smithson medal – the Smithsonian Institution’s most prestigious and highest award.