BucksCounty Community College

SMART.19288

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ethel.rackin@bucks.edu

Bucks County Community College does not discriminate in its educational programs, activities or employment practices based on race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion, ancestry, veteran status, union membership, or any other legally protected category.

Friday, April 10, 2020 - 7:30 p.m. Zlock Auditorium Jane Hirshfield and Luray Gross

Jane Hirshfield’s nine poetry books include The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a

“best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), have become classics in their field, as have her four books collecting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems; and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011. Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, Ledger, will appear from Knopf in early 2020.

Hirshfield’s other honors include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The California Book Award, Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. In fall 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In March 2019 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College, and elsewhere.

Luray Gross grew up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm in a household full of music and books. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Forenoon, Elegant Reprieve (1995–96 Still Waters Press Poetry Chapbook Competition winner), The Perfection of Zeros, and Lift.

She was the 2002 Poet Laureate of Bucks County and resident faculty at the 2006 Frost Place Festival and Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. She was the recipient of a fellowship in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and, in 2000, named one of the Council’s Distinguished Teaching Artists. A storyteller as well as poet, she has worked with thousands of students and teachers over the last twenty-some years.

WORDSMITHS

Calendar of Events

2019-2020

#BUCKSCCCbucks.edu

Wordsmiths Calendar of EventsFriday, September 20, 2019 - 7:30 p.m. Tyler Hall 142Melissa Stein and Hayden Saunier

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon Press, 2018) and Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, American

Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets, Beloit Poetry Review, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from The Pushcart Prize, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, Redivider, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis, and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco. Melissa is this year’s judge for the Bucks County Poet Laureate Contest.

Hayden Saunier has published four collections of poetry and her work has been awarded the 2013 Gell Poetry Prize, 2011 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the 2011 Rattle Poetry Grand Prize, and nominated numerous times for a Pushcart Prize. Hayden is a Poet Laureate of Bucks County.

Thursday, October 3, 2019 - 1:30 p.m. Tyler Hall 142Raquel Salas Rivera

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the author of while they sleep (under the bed is another country) from Birds, LLC

and the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets for their book x/ex/exis. They are also the author of six chapbooks and four other full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, lo terciario/the tertiary, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist, and was selected by Remezcla, Entropy, Literary Hub, mitú, Book Riot, and Publishers Weekly as one of the best poetry books of 2018. It is a Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. From 2016-2018, they were co-editor of The Wanderer and co-editor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Sundance Institute, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, the Arizona Poetry Center, and CantoMundo. They love and live for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy.

This event is being planned as part of the inaugural Bucks LatinX Heritage Month Celebration.

Friday, March 13, 2020 - 7:30 p.m. Tyler Hall 142Carole Maso and Cheryl Baldi

Carole Maso is the author of the novels: Mother and Child, Ghost Dance, The Art Lover, AVA, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, and Defiance; as well as Aureole (a book of short fictions); Break Every Rule (essays); The Room Lit by Roses (a journal of pregnancy

and birth) and Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Lannan Fellowship. She is a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.

Cheryl Baldi is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, a former Bucks County Poet Laureate, and a finalist for the Robert Fraser Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals, including Bitter Oleander, for which she was a finalist in the 2006 Francis Locke Memorial Award and

Salamander, which nominated her work in 2008 for the Best New Poets anthology. She served on the faculty of Bucks County Community College for 25 years teaching writing and literature, has worked as a free-lance editor, and served as co-facilitator for community based workshops exploring women’s lives through literature. Her collection of poems, The Shapelessness of Water, evokes a coastal landscape that echoes the loss and love of four generations of family. She lives with her husband in Bucks County.All Readings are free and open to the public,

and are held on the Newtown Campus. The readings are funded by the Cultural

Programming Committee. Contact: Ethel Rackin, ethel.rackin@bucks.edu