At 7 pm on Thursday, July 23, 2009, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures continues its Summer Shorts series at the WYEP Community Broadcast Center on the South Side with "Iran Unveiled," a program featuring two Iranian women authors, Anahita Firouz and Moniro Ravanipour. The program is offered in collaboration with Pittsburgh City of Asylum.

Open Thread, the non-profit organization that hosted this past weekend's Small Press Festival (SPF) expo at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, held a reading which featured three winners of its first-ever Tri-State Chapbook Contest, in partnership with Encyclopedia Destructica.

The preface to Volume 3 of pulp. begins the work with a note on its theme, a variation of medieval aesthetics that, in the form of a storybook rife with illuminated text and "other handcrafted visual elements inspired by the medieval time period," gives its readership "the epic, the tragic, the beautiful, and more than a Happily Ever After."

In Pittsburgh, a city known for balkanization, what with its countless neighborhoods and various parochial idiosyncrasies, the literary scene functions much like a fractal. It is constituted of a culture that encompasses communities of artists, musicians, publishers and writers within communities of artists, musicians, publishers and writers. July 18, 2009, the opening day of the first-ever Pittsburgh Small Press Festival expo at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery did well to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of the Pittsburgh literary scene while highlighting the unity in diversity that provides a nucleus for an ever-widening cultural circle of artists in the Pittsburgh area.

Looking for an expert opinion on who constitutes the list of Pittsburgh's best poets, I decided to go to experienced veterans of the Burgh's ever-expanding circle of versesayers, Kris Collins and Scott Silsbe, who manage Caliban Book Shop on South Craig Street by day and satiate their poetic cravings by night, penning their own published (and soon-to-be published work) while running The New Yinzer online literary magazine and hosting poetry readings around town.

According to co-directors of Open Thread, Scott Andrew and Adam Atkinson, the Pittsburgh SPF was created specifically to "give authors, bookmakers, editors, and publishers an opportunity to sell their books-and provide Pittsburghers with a chance to more fully experience the region's small press community. Open Thread's mission is to establish frameworks for artistic discovery in Pittsburgh and the surrounding tri-state area."