Wordsmiths Reading Series
Friday, September 22 at 7:30 p.m.
Tyler Hall 142, Newtown Campus
Joanna Fuhrman
Joanna Fuhrman, an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, is the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Fuhrman’s next book Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/ Northwestern University Press in 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming on The Slowdown podcast and in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry 2023. Last year—after publishing with them since she was a teenager, Fuhrman became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.
Lynn Levin
Lynn Levin is a poet and writer. She is the author of nine books, most recently House Parties (Spuyten Duyvil), her debut collection of short fiction. Philadelphia Magazine calls the stories “vivid, funny, and quietly powerful” and says, “House Parties may break your heart, but it’ll never do it the same way twice.” A Bucks County poet laureate and winner of the Bucks County Short Fiction Contest, Levin has published stories, poems, essays, and translations in Valparaiso Fiction Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Cleaver, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mandorla, and other places. She lives in Southampton, Pennsylvania and teaches at Drexel University.
Friday, October 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Tyler Hall 142, Newtown Campus
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (2023); Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. She teaches at Princeton University.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Hayden Saunier
Hayden Saunier is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook, and her work has been awarded the Rattle Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Prize, and a Pushcart prize. Published widely in journals and magazines, her poems have been featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and National Public Radio. An actor as well as a writer, she is the founder/director of No River Twice, an interactive, audience-driven poetry performance.
Sunday, November 12 at 1 p.m.
Tyler Hall 142, Newtown Campus
Courtney Bambrick
Courtney Bambrick is poetry editor at Philadelphia Stories. Poems in or forthcoming in Inkwell, Invisible City, New York Quarterly, Beyond Words, The Fanzine, Philadelphia Poets, Apiary, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mad Poets Review, and Certain Circuits. She teaches writing at Thomas Jefferson University’s East Falls campus in Philadelphia.
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.