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Bucks County Community College Kicks Off Fall 2024 Wordsmiths Reading Series
The Wordsmiths Reading Series, one of the longest-running cultural events at Newtown-based Bucks County Community College, continues its proud tradition of live readings with three exciting gatherings for the fall 2024 season.
Thursday, September 12, 12:15 p.m., Hicks Art Center Gallery | Nathan Spoon
The Language and Literature and the Arts and Communication Departments at Bucks County Community College are pleased to announce that renowned poet Nathan Spoon will present a reading of new work and favorites in the Hicks Art Center Gallery on September 12 at 12:15 p.m.
Nathan Spoon is a self-described “autistic poet with savant abilities” and author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, forthcoming in the Propel Disability Poetry Series published by Nine Mile Books. His poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Mid/South Sonnets: A Belle Point Press Anthology, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly and has read his poems at Penn, Vanderbilt, Yale, and elsewhere.
The reading is organized in conjunction with the exhibition “Dreams of Flora & Fauna.” Practicing from the Center for Creative Works and Studio Route 29 that support artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities, the participating exhibition artists’ works range from ceramics, drawings, monoprints, paintings, puppetry, performance, and weaving. Artworks in which animals appear are grouped into areas they are found together in real life or classified; sea, safari, farm, birds, dinosaurs, cats and dogs, bears and spiders. The flowers and plant works separate the animal groups, visually registering their taxonomies.
Visitors to Nathan Spoon’s reading and the public are invited to attend the closing reception for both exhibitions in Hicks Art Center Gallery “Dreams of Flora and Fauna” and “Endless Summer” later in the afternoon on September 12 from 4 – 7 pm. The reading and reception with light refreshments are free and open to the public.
For more information about the art exhibitions, please contact Clifford Eberly, Exhibitions Associate, at gallery@bucks.edu or 215-968-8432.
Friday, October 25, 7:30 p.m., Tyler Hall 142 | Kasey Jueds and Bernadette McBride
The next reading in the fall series features poets Kasey Jueds and Bernadette McBridge who will read selected works in room 142 of the historic Tyler Hall on the Newtown Campus on October 25 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, November 16, 1 p.m., Tyler Hall 142 | Thomas Devaney and 2024 Poet Laureate
The final reading in the fall series features Thomas Devaney and the still-to-be-selected 2024 Poet Laureate.
About the Wordsmiths Reading Series
The first Wordsmiths reading was in the 1960s, and featured Allen Ginsburg strumming on his guitar, and chanting verses to the audience as they swayed sitting on top of cushions on the floor. Since then, the series has featured dozens of outstanding and respected poets over the years. In recent years, the series has also featured renowned fiction writers. Poets featured in the series have won a host of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book award, and the PEN Literary Award.
As the founder and leader of the renowned Wordsmiths series, Bucks County Community 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.
Ethel Rackin, Ph.D., a Language and Literature professor at the College, is the director of the Wordsmiths Reading Series and Poet Laureate Program. Dr. Rackin has been organizing these public collaborations since 2010, shortly after she began her teaching career at Bucks. For more information on the Wordsmiths Reading Series, visit our website or contact Dr. Rackin at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu.
[Photo of Nathan Spoon by Daniel Meigs.]
Bucks County Poet Laureate Competition Announces Final Call for Entries
Bucks County Community College issued the final call for entries for the 48th annual Bucks County Poet Laureate. The Bucks County Poet Laureate Program is seeking the 2024 Laureate. The postmark deadline for submission to the competition is Friday, September 13, 2024.
The Bucks Laureate Program is one of the oldest in the country. It also holds a High School Poet Contest every spring.
The winner of the competition will receive a $500 honorarium, a plaque from the Bucks County Commissioners, and a reading at Bucks County Community College in the fall with the previous year’s laureate, Tara Tamburello.
The 2024 final judge will be Kasey Jueds. Keeper, Jueds’ first book, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and was published by Pitt in 2013. Her second book, The Thicket, was published by Pitt in 2021. Jueds has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Soapstone, and the Ucross Foundation; she has also been a visiting poet at the University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle College, and the University of Northern Colorado. She currently resides in New York State.
Preliminary judge will be Thomas Devaney. Devaney is a poet, facilitator, and educator based in Philadelphia. He is a Pew Fellow in the Arts with a focus on city building and community engagement. He wrote and co-directed the film Bicentennial City with Green House Media (2020). Devaney is the author of Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press, 2019) and You Are the Battery (Black Square Editions, 2019).
Entrants to the competition must be Bucks County residents and 18 years or older. Poetry of any kind is welcome. The entry requires 10 poems, any style, form, or length. All work must be original, published, or unpublished, typewritten or word-processed, one poem per page, in black ink. Poems and entry form must be submitted online.
For more information, contact Dr. Ethel Rackin at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu.
Sō Percussion with Caroline Shaw Appearing Live at the Zlock
Enjoy the vibrant collaboration of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and the innovative Sō Percussion in an electrifying program blending voice and percussion quartet as they share the music from their newest album Rectangles and Circumstance on Friday, August 23 at 7:30 p.m. Co-written by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion, the genre-blending songs use verses from nineteenth-century poems by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake. Chamber music meets singer-songwriter storytelling in this extraordinary performance showcasing vital, expressive, and imaginative music-making.
Sō Percussion has been redefining chamber music in the 21st century for more than 20 years. They are celebrated by audiences and presenters for a dazzling range of work and an extravagant array of collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater.
Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums. She is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
Do not miss your chance to experience this enthralling collaboration at the Zlock Performing Arts Center located on Bucks County Community College’s Newtown Campus (275 Swamp Road, Newtown, Pa. 18940). The lobby cash bar will be available starting at 6 p.m. for attendees to enjoy refreshments before and during the concert.
Tickets are available now and can be purchased online.
Bucks County Short Fiction Contest Announces Call for Entries
Bucks County Community College has issued a call for entries for its short fiction contest for adults who live in Bucks County. The deadline for submissions is Thursday, October 10, 2024, at noon.
The top three winners in the contest will receive gift cards of $200, $100, and $50, respectively, and will read from their work at a celebration on Saturday, November 9, at the College. We will be joined by writer C.J. Spataro, who will be the final judge.
Adults aged 18 and older, who are residents of Bucks County, may submit one story of up to 15 typewritten pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman, 12 point). Stories must be previously unpublished, including in online formats. For complete rules and to access the online submission system, please go to the Bucks County Short Fiction Contest page. Entrants may not be full- or part-time employees of Bucks County Community College, although work-study students at the College may enter. A separate contest for high school students will be held in Spring 2025.
C.J. Spataro directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Publishing programs at Rosemont College and is a founding partner of Philadelphia Stories. She is an award-winning short fiction writer. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including Taboos & Transgressions, Iron Horse Literary Review, december, Sequestrum, and Exacting Clam. Her debut novel, More Strange Than True, was published by Sagging Meniscus Press in June 2024.
This event receives support from the Department of Language and Literature.
For further information, contact the contest coordinator, Professor Elizabeth Luciano, at Elizabeth.Luciano@bucks.edu.
New Exhibitions Opening On July 24 At Hicks Art Center Gallery At Bucks
Bucks County Community College (BCCC) is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions: “Dreams of Flora and Fauna” and “Endless Summer” at Hicks Art Center Gallery at the College’s Newtown Campus on Wednesday, July 24.
In the main gallery, “Dreams of Flora and Fauna,” comprised of the work of 17 local artists, features fanciful, naturalistic, pop, symbolic and abstract scenes of botanic and animal depictions. The artists’ renderings—across mediums including drawing, painting, collage, fiber, ceramics, and video—range from subtle, delicate lines, to dense and rich color fields, and hypnotic patterns to sculpted animated shapes and puppetry. The exhibition transports the viewer to multiple fantasy realms through the portal of the gallery. Boldly and delicately painted, drawn and stitched flowers mingle with nightmarish spiders, hybrid beasts and cartoon stylized animals conjuring an imaginative art safari tour for viewers.
The artists participating in “Dreams of Flora and Fauna” create their artworks and products in Studio Route 29 in Frenchtown, New Jersey or at The Center for Creative Works in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Grounded in Progressive Art Studio practices, both organizations advocate for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities to focus on professional development and to exhibit in a variety of venues and locations.
Outside the main gallery, a film created by BCCC Arts and Communication artists, “Can You Repeat That” will be screened continuously alongside “Dreams of Flora and Fauna.” The film documents BCCC student Sean Hesser’s life living and thriving with motor impairment and cerebral palsy. By featuring the works of neurodiverse artists and Sean Hesser’s narrative perspective documentary alongside one another, Hicks Art Center Gallery affirms its mission to inclusively promote all artists’ access for invitation and participation in gallery exhibitions at Bucks County Community College now and in the future.
In conjunction with “Dreams of Flora and Fauna”, on September 12, the neurodiverse poet Nathan Spoon will present a reading at 12:15 p.m. in the main gallery. This event is collaboratively hosted with the BCCC Language and Literature Department and is free and open to the public.
In the hallways surrounding “Dreams of Flora and Fauna” and in the Atrium Gallery, the exhibition “Endless Summer” features over 30 local artists’ paintings and sculpture evoking the summer season experience. From realism, impressionism, to abstract, this diverse range of expressions brings the sensorial experiences of summer to life.
Visitors are invited to “escape the virtual” and take a break from the demands of our tech centered world by absorbing the different terrains, textures, times of day and weather in the artworks to remember the summer experience they most enjoy.
All are welcome to the closing reception of the exhibitions on Thursday, September 12 from 4–7 p.m. at the Hicks Art Center Gallery, Bucks County Community College, 275 Swamp Road, Newtown, PA 18940. The exhibition will remain on view through September 14. Summer gallery hours are Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. and Saturdays from noon – 4 p.m.
Images
Daniel Lacey, “Untitled”, caran d'ache on paper, 2024, crayon drawing with animals atop a bluff overlooking a beach scene
Joseph Arico, “Yellow Moon”, oil on canvas paper, 2006, painting shows a boat on water with a yellow moon in the background reflected on the water
Judy Barnett, “Wildflowers”, needlepoint on cotton, 2018, embroidered, brightly colored flowers on fabric
