Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets

Stadler Center for Poetry

In June 2008, the Stadler Center will conduct the twenty-fourth annual Seminar for Younger Poets. Held for three weeks in June, the Seminar provides an extended opportunity for undergraduate poets to write and to be guided by established poets. Staff and visiting poets conduct writing workshops and offer lecture/discussions, present readings of their own work, and are available for individual conferences. In the past, such poets as Robin Becker, Denise Duhamel, Linda Gregg, Terrance Hayes, James Harms, Mary Ruefle, Gerald Stern, David St. John, Michael Waters, and Afaa M. Weaver have served as visiting poets. Weekly readings provide the participants with the opportunity to hear and be heard by their peers. Applicants compete for ten places in the Seminar, all of which come with fellowships. Fellowships include tuition, housing in campus apartments, and meals. Accepted students are responsible only for their travel to Bucknell and a modest library deposit. A limited number of travel scholarships are available on the basis of need.

The dates of the 2008 Seminar will be Sunday, June 8, to Sunday, June 29. Please click here for application instructions.

VISITING POETS, JUNE 2008

For the 2008 Seminar, visiting poets Kazim Ali and Laurie Kutchins will join director G. C. Waldrep and staff members Deirdre O'Connor, Erinn Batykefer, and K. A. Hays.

	KAZIM ALI is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque, and The Fortieth Day, forthcoming in spring, 2008. His work has been featured in such journals as American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, jubilat, and Massachusetts Review. Ali teaches at ShippensburgUniversityand the low-residency MFA program of theUniversity of Southern Maine.
	LAURIE KUTCHINS is the author of three books of poetry, Slope of the Everlasting Child,The Night Path, and Between Towns. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and such magazines as The New Yorker, Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review. The recipient of many grants and awards, she teaches creative writing at JamesMadisonUniversity.

STAFF POETS

	G. C. WALDREP is the author of Goldbeater’s Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for Poetry) and Disclamor (2007). His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review, New American Writing, and other journals. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature. A new faculty member in the Department of English at Bucknell, he will teach creative writing and direct the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.
	DEIRDRE O'CONNOR'S book, Before the Blue Hour, was the winner of the Cleveland State Poetry Prize for 2001. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, River City, and other journals. She has received an individual artist’s grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Donn Goodwin Award for Irish-American poetry. O'Connor is a native of Pittsburgh.
	ERINN BATYYKEFER earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Art History from the University of Delaware and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was the Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Poetry Fellow. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a nomination for Best New Poets 2007, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award for poetry, and third prize in the 2006 International Tin House/SLS Kenya Nonfiction Contest. She is currently at work on first collections of both creative nonfiction and poetry; her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Threepenny Review, and Maisonneuve Magazine, among others. She is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
	KATIE HAYS earned an M.F.A. in the Literary Arts at Brown University and studied as an undergraduate at Bucknell and Oxford Universities. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Florida Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, Missouri Review, Antioch Review and other magazines. Editors at New Orleans Review and Black Warrior Review nominated her poems for the 2006 and 2007 Best New Poets anthologies, and she was a semifinalist for the 2007 Nation/“Discovery” Prize. Hays is also a fiction writer and verse translator whose work in those genres has appeared in Hudson Review, Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, and other magazines, and whose short stories have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.