BOOK REVIEWS & CONDUCTED INTERVIEWS

I am the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the Jewish Book Council's Berru Award for Poetry and the Ohioana Book Award, and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. My poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, The New Republic, and elsewhere. My work engages with the Rust Belt Jewish diaspora, labor and family businesses, and experimentation. 

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I hold fellowships from Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute, and a PhD in English and Creative Writing. My research examines the implications of reading Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff in interminority frameworks. I served as editor of Issue 13 of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts and a managing editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. I lead poetry workshops for Northeast Ohio Medical University and Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program. I was born in Youngstown, Ohio and live and teach in Wheeling, West Virginia. 

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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. 

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

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The Bind: a review site devoted to books of poetry by women and nonbinary authors:

• “The workshop is full of remnants of her, you don’t leave her”: Depictions of Female Labor in Factory Girls and Excess—The Factory (2020)

• A Literary Mapping of Horsepower by Joy Priest (2020)

• “You won’t even know / the toxin on your tongue”: A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon (2019)

• “Boy, Girl, Angel, Golem”: Multimodal Transformations in Alicia Jo Rabins’s Fruit Geode (2019)

• “All the rest is commentary": A Jewish Reading of Erica Meitner’s Holy Moly Carry Me (2018)

• Mapping the Valley: A Review of Cait Weiss Orcutt’s VALLEYSPEAK (2018)

• “Yes, it’s true // that I multiply like a queen”: Twinning in Shelley Wong's Rare Birds (2017)

• "A town we all know well”: A Collaborative Review of What It Done to Us by Essy Stone (2017)

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Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts:

• An Interview with Jessie Janeshek 2020)

• An interview with Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (2019)

• “The Opposite of Wounded Isn’t Healed": Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo (2018)

• Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country: an interview with Rebecca Morgan Frank (2018)

• "Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty": Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (2017)

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Other publications:

• Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark, Jewish Book Council (2018)

• The Rusted City by Rochelle Hurt, New Orleans Review (2015)

• Kind by Gretchen Primack, Texas Borderland Poetry Review 41 (2014)

• Interview with Jim Villani, Founder of Youngstown’s Pig Iron Press, Volney Road Review (2014)