Bucks County Community College is resuming its Wordsmiths Reading Series this fall, with three award-winning poets reading from their works online Friday, Oct. 9.
The event begins at 7:30 p.m., featuring Christopher Bursk, Joseph Chelius and Greg Probst. With restrictions on gatherings amid the ongoing pandemic, the free series has shifted to the internet, with all events streaming live on the college’s YouTube channel, youtube.com/BucksCCC.
Bursk, a recipient of Pew Foundation, NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, is the author of 17 books, most recently Dear Terror and Answer the Door. A longtime professor at Bucks, the grandfather of six and Langhorne Manor resident was the 1978 Bucks County Poet Laureate and has received numerous other awards for poetry, citizenship and humanitarianism.
Chelius works as an editorial director for a healthcare communications company in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He has published two chapbooks of poems with Pudding House Publications, and two full-length collections with WordTech Communications: The Art of Acquiescence (2014) and Crossing State Lines (2020). A resident of Bucks County for more than 25 years, he was the 2000 Bucks County Poet Laureate, and the first-prize winner of the inaugural short story contest (2017) at Bucks County Community College.
Probst is a writer of poetry and fiction, as well as a filmmaker. He is a recipient of the Pam Perkins-Frederick Memorial Scholarship for the Marriage of Art and Poetry and the Dr. Allen Hoey Memorial Scholarship for Short Fiction, both at Bucks County Community College. His writing has been featured in the Centurion, BCCC’s student newspaper; the Temple News, and in Hyphen, Temple University’s undergraduate literary magazine.
Contact Dr. Ethel Rackin at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu for more information.
