Bucks County Community College announced that the 2024 search is on for the 48th annual Bucks County Poet Laureate. This is one of the oldest Poet Laureate programs in the country.
The postmark deadline for submission to the competition is Friday, Sept. 13. The winner will receive a $500 honorarium, a plaque from the Bucks County Commissioners, and a reading at BCCC in the fall with the previous year’s winner 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.
Preliminary judge will be Thomas Devaney, 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 All work must be original, published or unpublished, typewritten or word-processed, one poem per page, in black ink.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 at bucks.edu/poetlaureateentry.
For more information, email BCCC professor and program director Ethel Rackin, Ph.D., at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu.
