Joel Dias-Porter (AKA DJ Renegade) will join our executive director, Jake Grefenstette, for a community celebration of the International Poetry Forum’s 60th birthday at City of Asylum Pittsburgh (40 W North Ave) at 3:00 PM on November 15, 2026.
This in-person event will feature stories about the history of the International Poetry Forum from Grefenstette and original poetry from Dias-Porter followed by a public reception. This event is free, but we expect tickets to go extremely quickly, so be sure to reserve your spot soon.
This 2026–2027 season marks the 60th birthday of the International Poetry Forum, which launched with a reading by Archibald MacLeish on October 19, 1966.
Founded in Pittsburgh by Samuel Hazo, the International Poetry Forum is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the art of spoken poetry. Participants in the Forum’s reading series and educational programs have included poets, performers, and public figures such as W.H. Auden, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Earl Jones, Grace Kelly, Fred Rogers, Anthony Hopkins, Queen Noor of Jordan, and hundreds more.
About the Artist:
Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Renegade) was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, and resides in South Jersey. The 1998 and 1999 Haiku Slam Champion, his work has been featured in POETRY, Best American Poetry 2014, Callaloo, Asahi Shimbun, Ploughshares, and anthologies Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, Poetry Nation, and Catch a Fire. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and 1995 Furious Flower “Emerging Poet.” His collection Ideas of Improvisation is on Thread Makes Blanket Press (2022).
About the Moderator:
Jake Grefenstette is president and executive director of the International Poetry Forum. Following undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oxford, Grefenstette received an M.Phil. from Peking University in Beijing, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Outside of the International Poetry Forum, Grefenstette teaches English and philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University and is editor of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series and Literary Translation Series. He lives in Pittsburgh with his family and their dog, Frodo Waggins.