Jeffrey Oaks, the English department’s director of undergraduate studies, a poetry teacher and valued mentor to fellow faculty, died Dec. 20, 2023, at 59.
Department chair Gayle Rogers recalled Oaks as “a unique spirit here on our campus. Jeff was a poet, artist, teacher, dog-lover and much more. He ran our undergraduate writing program with passion and dedication, and for his work in the classroom he was given the Dietrich School’s highest teaching honor, the Bellet Award. He was a graduate of our own MFA program and helped bring to life many of the exciting undergraduate courses that we teach every semester.”
Oaks “was there to deal with difficulties and make me laugh,” remembered departmental faculty colleague Ellen Smith, who had known him since they were graduate students together.
“He had a great way of doing administrative work without taking himself too seriously,” Smith said. “It was always amazing to see how Jeff organized his work,” as well as his “mindful life,” especially during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when Oaks took up painting and exhibited in his favorite local café, and how he walked his treasured black lab, Andy, twice a day on a trail by the Allegheny River, taking a photo at the same spot on the walk each time. “He was constantly an inspiration to a lot of us.”
She admired his teaching methods: “He had a devotion, with balance, and teaching was personal. … He really saw the students where they were, getting them to think about their lives, as well as challenging them in craft.
“He was just a great poet,” she added. Exploring both traditional and invented forms of poetry, “he realized that the freedom comes when you set limits for yourself.” He also taught a writers’ journal course, where “he tried to get students to understand that writing is a way of living, how you initiate writing from parts of living.” Her own students told Smith that Oaks was the instructor who first got them to write about subjects it had been difficult to address previously in their work.
“He was very generous” as a mentor, she said, “and I admired him so much.” She still asks herself what Oaks would do in certain situations and tries to emulate that, although she adds that “he was pretty irreverent and would laugh at that notion.”
Concluded Smith: “It is hard to think about the department, my life, the dog park, the café, without him being there.”
Jeffrey Scott Oaks was born June 6, 1964, in Geneva, N.Y. He came to Pitt as a graduate student in 1987, completed an MFA in poetry in 1990 and began teaching writing courses here, including Introduction to Poetry, Poetry Workshop and Autobiography and the Creative Impulse. He was also the first managing director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series, for 11 years, then in 2012 became assistant director of the Writing program and, in 2019, director of undergraduate studies, and a teaching professor.
Oaks received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. His second book of poetry, “The Things,” was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in March 2022; his first, “Little What,” was published by the same house in September 2019. Oaks’ poetry appeared most recently in Best New Poets, Field, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Superstition Review and Tupelo Quarterly, while his prose pieces have been in At Length, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Kenyon Review Online and Water~Stone Review. His work has appeared in the anthologies “Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction,” and “My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them.”
Departmental faculty colleague Shannon Reed, whom Oaks helped to hire, this fall worked as co-director of undergraduate studies with him.
“He was just really fun to work with in all honesty,” Reed said. “He understood that all the administrative stuff should be to support the professors and make sure the students learn as best they can.
“We were mutually supportive but he was always there when I needed to vent or complain,” she said. “He had all sorts of institutional knowledge that I did not have. … So often I would walk by his office and hear pleasant conversation coming out and think, oh, he must be talking with a colleague. Then I would see he was talking with a student. … That's what I think of when I think of Jeff at his best — enjoying talking about writing with people who are technically below him (in experience and skill) but are just as worthy of talking about writing.”
Recalled departmental faculty colleague and friend, Geeta Kothari: “I texted with him all the time and he was hilarious. He had a dark sense of humor and a great sense of language. He was a great colleague and friend. We grew up together in the department. You’d go to him with a thing you want to solve in a class, he would come up with an exercise or an idea or a class plan just in minutes.”
She still prepares for teaching her classes in the way Oaks recommended years ago: “I was furiously preparing for a class and just taking millions of notes and kind of making myself crazy. And he said, ‘You should really be able to go into your class with class notes on a Post-It note,’ ” just knowing the right questions to ask of students.
“He mentored a lot of people informally and formally,” she added. “I would often text him and just say ‘Does this sound like a crazy idea?’ ” When discussing any classroom conundrum, “he really validated your experience as a teacher in the classroom” — and students’ experiences too. “To be able to listen to both is kind of amazing.”
Oaks is survived by his husband, Michael Rusnak and his brother, Steven Oaks.
Memorial gifts are suggested to Family Hospice.
— Marty Levine