News Release
Bernadette McBride Named 2009 Bucks County Poet Laureate
Buckingham writer and professor will read from her works Sunday, November 15 at Newtown
For poet and professor Bernadette McBride, the third time was the charm. The Holicong resident has been named the 2009 Bucks County Poet Laureate, officials at Bucks County Community College announced, on her third attempt at winning the state’s longest-running laureate contest.
McBride teaches writing and literature at Temple University and BCCC, She said she was surprised and humbled to be named the county’s 33rd poet laureate, especially since as a writer, poetry is her first love – a fact she can’t quite explain.
“That’s like trying to explain why I love someone: Do I love my husband because of his dry sense of humor, my children because they made me a Mother’s Day card in third grade, my mother because she’s helped me so much over the years? Of course not; I simply love them,” she said. “Likewise, for me, this draw to poetry as a means of self-expression is intangible, abstract, yet undeniably known. I can’t not do it; it floods in without my summoning it.”
The judges called McBride “a deeply centered poet… The characters are as recognizable as a recurrent dream…yet they still manage to tell us what we do not know, or perhaps what we do not know that we know.” They added that her work “showed a deft sense of timing, including how to resolve a poem on a wonderful note of mixed delicacy and strength. The detail is wisely chosen, the music palpable, and the emotions are important ones to ponder.”
Though primarily a poet, McBride has written several short stories and numerous essays, in addition to feature articles when she worked as a journalist. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including Ibbetson Street Press, The Penwood Review, and Slow Trains. She also placed second in the 2006 International Ray Bradbury Writing competition.
The Philadelphia native earned a B.A. from Holy Family University, an M.A. from St. Joseph’s University, and did course work in the graduate program at the University of Minnesota. An educator for most of her adult life, she taught junior- and senior-high school English for nearly twenty years, as well as Celtic Art and Culture in the Continuing Education Department at Bucks. In addition to Bucks and Temple, she’s also currently teaching at the New Hope-Solebury Community School.
McBride’s poetry rose to the top of 78 entrants judged blindly by a trio of poets, according to Dr. Allen Hoey, director of the poet laureate program and a Bucks professor. Hoey narrowed the field to 20 finalists, which were then reviewed by Steven Huff, author of More Daring Escapes (Red Hen Press); and Nancy White, who won the 1992 Word Works Washington Prize for her collection Sun, Moon, Salt. Her second collection, Detour, will be published by Tamarack Editions in 2010.
Huff and White also determined six runners-up in the competition. They are, in descending order, Kathleen Mulholland of Newtown, Bucks Professor James Freeman of Newtown, Josh Cooper of Warminster, Camille Norvaisas of Feasterville, Laura Adams Gaydos of Chalfont, and Melinda Rizzo of Quakertown.
McBride lives in the Holicong section of Buckingham Township with her husband in their “empty nest.” She has two grown children as well as stepchildren and grandchildren living throughout the Northeast. She will be honored with a proclamation from the Bucks County Commissioners and receive a $500 award.
The Bucks County Poet Laureate program, which includes the High School Poet of the Year contest each spring, is another way that Bucks County Community College supports our cultural heritage. For more information on the program, contact director Dr. Allen Hoey at 215-968-8279.
Intersection
An old man in a worn red parka lingers
in the north yard of the church
on the corner of 2nd and Main, his back
to the grit of traffic as he bows
toward a new-flowered tomb--modest
among an assembly of angels
made of stone. I watch him from my place
in the line of cars waiting for the light
to change. His white hair lifts in the wind,
thin strands standing upright, brushing pale
against a scrim of low, gathering clouds--
a feathery crown yearning toward heaven.
He is fixed in an invisible cocoon, wings
still curled; reverent hands folded
one over the other--chapeled away from us,
who, when the light goes green, will continue
to compete our ways home. Most
to be greeted by the living.
—Bernadette McBride
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Assistant Director, Public Relations 215-968-8094/8093 |
