Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets
The Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, the Stadler Center's renowned summer poetry program, recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Each June the Seminar brings together a cohort of promising undergraduate poets from across the country for a week of reading, writing, and discussion under the guidance of established faculty poets. BSUP alumni include Ilya Kaminsky, Donika Kelly, Ted Genoways, Mary Szybist, Jane Wong, Kevin Young and other luminaries of the American poetry community.
Accepted applicants receive free tuition, lodging, meals, and a travel stipend. Undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities who will complete their sophomore, junior, or senior year in the year of application are eligible to apply. The Seminar is currently directed by Jessica Nirvana Ram, the Center's Publicity & Outreach Manager and author of the poetry collection Earthly Gods.
Apply for the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets residence program
The application portal opens on Oct. 15, 2025.
The application deadline is Jan. 31, 2026.
Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse contending with the realities of class and race, which was awarded The 2024 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry. She has earned a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, POETRY, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2023, she served as Philadelphia’s 6th Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-chairs the creative writing department at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.
Chet'la Sebree is the author of the poetry collections Blue Opening; Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her debut essay collection TURN (W)HERE: A Geography of Home is forthcoming in 2026. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and has been published in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review and Lit Hub among other venues. Currently, she’s an assistant professor at the George Washington University and faculty in Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program.
Jessica Nirvana Ram is the author of the debut poetry collection Earthly Gods (Game Over Books, 2024) and the chapbook in the aftermath (Fifth Wheel Press, 2025). Jessica earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her BA from Susquehanna University. Jessica's work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review, and Cream City Review, among others. She was a 2022-23 Stadler Fellow in Literary Arts Administration and now works as the Publicity and Outreach Manager for the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts at Bucknell University.