I'm the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017--available here), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award. The collection explores a trucking motel and laundry through three generations against a backdrop of regional deindustrialization. Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013) won the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. My article examining the implications of reading Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff in interminority frameworks was published in Studies in American Jewish Literature.   

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Business, a novella about the nightlife of working-class women on the eve of Youngstown's deindustrialization, is forthcoming. My current poetry manuscript examining the global Rust Belt, General Motors Lordstown, the Situationist International, and Jewish motherhood was awarded a 2024 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award.  

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My poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The New Republic, The Missouri Review, Dusie, Oxford American, and elsewhere. ​My work has been supported by Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute. I hold a PhD in English and Creative Writing. I've taught workshops across genres at programs including Stanford University, Ohio State University, and Northeast Ohio Medical University. I live with a historian and our children in the Rust Belt.

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If you're struggling, know that I care about your art and health, and I'm committed to working on ways to make our field more equitable. I'm always happy to talk to other first-gen academics about the field.  

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​Note on pronunciation: Pitinii is pronounced pih-TEE-nee, from the Greek "Ptinis."