At a recent gathering of faculty and students to congratulate Peter Trachtenberg on his retirement, Geeta Kothari and Jeanne Marie Laskas went up to the microphone to give an account of their first encounter with Peter at his MLA job interview in Los Angeles back in 2011. Geeta remarked on how she’d put her foot in her mouth when she awkwardly noted his resemblance or nonresemblance to ‘80s rockstar Rick Springfield. And Jeanne Marie, fresh off reading Peter’s acclaimed second book, The Book of Calamities, recalled asking him: “So you’ve tackled the problem of human suffering in the world. What do you take on next?” She’ll never forget how Peter stopped, thought for a moment, and then said, “I think I’m going to write about my cat.” 
That is Peter Trachtenberg in a nutshell. He’s humble. And he’ll surprise you. He’s funny. And he’s a writer who is equally curious about the philosophical groundings of the Rwandan Genocide and of death row as he is about the nature of love in its multitude of forms, including the kind he feels for a cat named Biscuit (RIP, Biscuit). For more on Biscuit, please read Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons—a book by Peter Trachtenberg, or, as The Washington Post refers to him, “a genuine American Dostoevsky.”
But for all the care Peter has put into his writing, he has perhaps put even more into his teaching and his work with his students. At that same gathering, MFA alumnus Brian Broome (Nonfiction, ‘21), stood up to give a toast to Peter, who helped shepherd him through the completion of his Kirkus Prize-winning memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods (2021 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Brian remarked on how, when he first came into the program, he felt like an imposter—that he had no right to call himself a writer and didn’t belong. It was Peter, he said, who convinced him otherwise. Peter had taken a long, winding path to his career at Pitt, which was his first academic appointment. When he was a young writer, he had asked himself the same questions that Brian did. He knew what it was like to feel like an outsider, and he never forgot it. He stayed close to his roots and he stayed humble. And he concerned himself with his students as people who needed to feel like they belonged.
And here’s where I come in. When I think about the trajectory of my own academic career—and my sense of myself as a writer—I think of Peter. I joined the Writing program faculty in 2016, and I also felt very much like an outsider. I was working in a different medium than everyone else (I produce narrative audio), and there wasn’t a clear place for me and the kinds of work I do or the kinds of classes I would go on to teach. Peter was the one who went out of his way to welcome me. He was the one who understood. And when he didn’t understand, he was curious and wanted to learn more. I often wonder how my early years on the faculty would have been without his steadfast belief in me and his willingness to help me carve out my place here. Thank you, Peter.
With such a generous spirit, it should come as no surprise, then, that Peter’s record of service to the department has been unparalleled. He directed the Writing program from 2016 to 2020—and then, following the pandemic, when we needed to pick up the pieces and keep the ship afloat, it was Peter who volunteered to step up direct it yet again. Grad students will tell you there has never been an MFA manuscript committee that Peter turned down. And faculty will tell you that his innovative contributions to the curriculum—including courses in “lyric journalism” and narrative medicine, collaborations with the medical school, and community workshops with the Veterans Administration—have inspired them to push the boundaries of their own teaching in unexpected ways.
But if there was one comment at that recent gathering where we raised our glasses to Peter that was the most emphatic and widely shared, it was this one: That Peter Trachtenberg is the gentleman of the department. He is kind and caring above all else. He sees the best in everyone and makes us want to be our best selves. I know I speak for so many of us when I say that Peter’s departure leaves a hole in our department and in our hearts. We’ll miss him, and we wish him all the cats he could ever love.
—Erin Anderson
Erin Anderson is an assistant professor in the Writing program, where she teaches courses in narrative audio and multimedia nonfiction for the undergraduate and MFA programs. She is affiliated faculty in Film and Media Studies.