JAKE GREFENSTETTE (LEFT) AND SAMUEL HAZO OF THE INTERNATIONAL POETRY FORUM. | PHOTO BY HUCK BEARD

The International Poetry Forum closed up shop in 2009. In its 43 years under the guidance of founder and director Samuel Hazo, the forum hosted readings by more than 800 poets and performers.

Just a short list of the luminaries who graced the forum’s stage is staggering to consider: former U.S Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, novelists Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike, Oscar and Emmy-award winning actor James Earl Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop, Princess Grace of Monaco, Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney and Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.

Even the actress and model Brooke Shields made an appearance, surprising the audience with a selection of poems read in French and English by the likes of Jacques Prevert, Mona Van Duyn and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Hazo taught at Duquesne University for 43 years. Now, at age 96, he holds the position of McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus. He was named Pennsylvania’s first — and only — poet laureate in 1993, serving for 10 years.

He reluctantly shut down the nonprofit forum 15 years ago. It was the time of the Great Recession; funding streams for many arts organizations dried up.

In his closing remarks at the forum’s final event, Hazo quoted Spanish poet Antonio Machado, perhaps a bit wistfully as he looked toward an uncertain future: “Wayfarer, there is no road. You make up the road as you go.”

Fast forward 14 years to a sunny afternoon last September at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Oakland, where the forum made an improbable return. In the hall that served as home to the forum’s first incarnation, Jake Grefenstette — the forum’s 31-year-old new president and executive director — introduced Hazo to the stage as the first reader of this new era.

Grefenstette grew up in the Baldwin-Whitehall area and attended high school in Mt. Lebanon. After graduation he lived a peripatetic life studying philosophy, theology and poetry.

“I hopped around a little bit. Went to Notre Dame for undergrad, was in China for graduate school,” receiving his master of philosophy degree from Peking University, before heading to England, where he most recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

“But Pittsburgh was always the end goal. About the time our daughter was born a few years ago, we moved back. We couldn’t be happier.”

It wasn’t until he returned to Pittsburgh that he met Hazo through a mutual friend. “Sam has always loomed as this kind of hero,” Grefenstette acknowledges. That friend reached out to Grefenstette soon after that meeting, informing him,“Sam’s been talking about this [the return of the forum] pretty seriously for the first time in years. Would this be something you’d be interested in?” Grefenstette was thrilled.

Along with fundraising and curating events, Grefenstette is jump-starting the Poets in Person program, which Hazo began in 1966. This brings visiting writers into local high schools for readings and workshops, upholding one of the missions of the forum to help students “feel like they’re growing up in a city where you can be a poet.”

To that end, he is taking the forum into new territory with a podcast called “The Greatest Lines of All Time.” “The idea is we have episodes under 2 minutes that focus either on a local poet or an alumnus of the forum,” he says. He will start posting these short episodes on social media at the end of January.

Grefenstette stresses that all of these initiatives are meant to showcase, on both a local and national level, that “Pittsburgh is a great literary city.”

In addition to Hazo, the opening season featured National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes and British-American classicist Emily Wilson. Coming April 15 is poet Srikanth Reddy, University of Chicago professor and poetry editor of The Paris Review. Also, Grammy Award-winning artist Judy Collins will read from her new poetry collection at a forum-sponsored event on May 31 during the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books. She had appeared twice before with the forum years ago.

When Grefenstette introduced Hazo to a standing ovation on that sunny afternoon in Oakland last September, he shared an anecdote. “I’m sure that many of you have heard the story that, in the very first year of operation, Dr. Hazo received a phone call from Harrisburg asking about chickens in Pittsburgh … wanting to know what was going on with the International Poultry Forum.”

The line got a big laugh, but it served as a good reminder of just how far the forum and the City of Pittsburgh have come in the intervening years.

“Sam created something very special here,” he says.

Kristofer Collins writes the Pittsburgh Lit column for Pittsburgh Magazine. His most recent poetry collection is “Roundabout Trace.” He recently was invited to join the International Poetry Forum Advisory Council, an unpaid position. He lives in Stanton Heights with his wife and two children.