Wordsmiths Reading Series
Lisa Sewell and Thomas Devaney
Friday, February 21, 7:30 p.m., Tyler Hall 142
About Lisa Sewell
Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out (Alice James Books), Name Withheld (Four Way Books), Long Corridor, which received the 2009 Keystone Chapbook award from Seven Kitchens Press, Impossible Object, which won the 2014 Tenth Gate prize from The Word Works Press, and Birds of North America (Drawing Room), a collaboration with artist Susan Hagen and poet Nathalie Anderson. A new book of poems, Flood Plain, was just published by Grid Books. She is co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan 2007), Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America (Wesleyan 2012), and North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language (Wesleyan 2021) with Kazim Ali.
Sewell has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso, The Tyrone Guthrie Center and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at Villanova University.
Thomas Devaney
Thomas Devaney is a Pew Fellow in the Arts and author of five books, including Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press), Calamity Jane (Furniture Press), and The Picture that Remains, a collaboration with photographer Will Brown (The Philadelphia Print Center). He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City, exploring the legacy of Philadelphia's 1976 Bicentennial celebration. Devaney's work has been published in Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. The literary hub Blue Stoop: A Home for Philly Writers was named after his poem "The Blue Stoop."
For twelve years, Devaney taught creative writing at Haverford College. He now works at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, where he recently completed a master's degree in urban design. His thesis, "Reimagining Urban Parks: Philadelphia's FDR Park as a Space for People and Nature" (2024) reflects his ongoing engagement with urban spaces and explores the intersection of people and place through civic storytelling.
Carolyn Kuebler
Thursday, April 3, 12:30 p.m., Tyler Hall 142
About Carolyn Kuebler
Carolyn Kuebler’s debut novel, Liquid, Fragile, Perishable, was published by Melville House in May 2024. Carolyn was a co-founder of the literary magazine Rain Taxi and for the past ten years she has been the editor of the New England Review. Her stories and essays have been published in The Common and Colorado Review, among others, and “Wildflower Season,” published in The Massachusetts Review, won the 2022 John Burroughs Award for Nature Essay. She has published dozens of book reviews, small-press profiles, and author interviews in Publishers Weekly, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi, City Pages, and others.
Originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Carolyn has an MFA from Bard College and a BA from Middlebury College. She worked for years as a bookseller at Borders Book Shop in Minneapolis and the Hungry Mind in St. Paul, before heading to New York, where she was an editor at Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. In addition to editing NER, she is currently a justice of the peace, a volunteer with 350 Vermont, a bad bird-watcher, and an even worse gardener. She lives in Middlebury with her husband, Christopher, and daughter, Vivian Ross.
A History of Wordsmiths Reading Series
Since the 1960s, Bucks County Community College’s Wordsmiths Reading Series has featured some of the most distinguished and admired poets of our times. The list of poets from the 1960s includes Allen Ginsberg (with cushion and guitars), Galway Kinnell, William Stafford, Richard Hugo, Kenneth Koch, Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Forché, Derek Walcott, Lucille Clifton, Denise Levertov, David Ignatow, Joseph Brodsky, Philip Levine, James Tate, Wendell Berry, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Robert Bly, John Logan, Carol Muske-Dukes, Tess Gallagher, Maxine Kumin, and James Dickey. The 1970s featured, among others, Etheridge Knight, Gary Snyder, John Logan, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Creeley, Alan Dugan, Judith Sherwin, Adrienne Rich, and W. D. Snodgrass. In recent years, the series has continued to highlight contemporary literary luminaries such as Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky, Martín Espada, Bob Holman, Mark Doty, Gerald Stern, James Richardson, Evie Shockley, Anne Marie Macari, Dean Rader, Charles Simic, Jericho Brown, Richard Blanco, Li-Young Lee, Chase Twichell, and Brenda Hillman. Additionally, in recent years, the series has featured some of the most notable fiction writers of our time, including Andre Dubus and Ben Marcus. The awards bestowed on our featured writers are too numerous to name, and include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book award, and the PEN Literary Award.
Cultural Significance
As the founder and leader of the renowned Wordsmiths series, the College has distinguished itself among Philadelphia-area colleges and universities, and has become the home of a vibrant community of writers, poetry lovers, and supporters of the arts. Wordsmiths readings are always widely attended. Guest writers are often paired with inspiring local ones, and the audience is typically made up of a lively mix of students, faculty, and the community at-large. The series gives students the opportunity to connect what they learn in the classroom with the wider world by attending high caliber free readings on their own campus. Simply put, the series places Bucks County Community College at the center of the region’s literary life.
The Wordsmiths Reading Series is funded by BCCC’s Cultural Programming Committee.