Peter Oresick

Peter Oresick was a poet, publisher, printer, teacher, and painter. Born in Ford City, Pennsylvania, to a working-class family, he earned his BA and MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, paying his tuition with a job at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.

Oresick is the author of seven poetry collections, including Iconoscope: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and Warhol-o-rama (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008), and editor of a number of books about working-class poetry and Pittsburgh. As an editor, he is perhaps best-known for Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life (University of Illinois Press, 1990).

Oresick’s lifelong project, writes Dakota Garilli in the Coal Hill Review, was “the democratization of poetry and a true, beautiful expression of the working class experience in America.” Oresick was awarded the Heinz Endowment Fellowship and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He worked in publishing for 22 years and taught at high schools and universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Chatham University.

Oresick died of cancer in 2016.