SPRING 2024
Poetry Panel Presentation and Reading
with Artress Bethany White and Danielle Legros Georges
Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters
March 21
5:30pm
Main Hall Room 200
Danielle Legros Georges is a poet, translator, and editor who works in the areas of
contemporary U.S. poetry, Black and African- diasporic poetry and literature, and
Caribbean/Latin American and 
Haitian studies. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from institutions
including the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Foundation, the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and the Black Metropolis Research
Consortium. In 2014 she was named poet laureate of the city of Boston. Her four-year
term included collaborations with area artists, literary organizations, museums, libraries,
and schools; and representation of Boston at international events. She is professor
emeritus of creative writing at Lesley University.
Image Credit: Jennifer Waddell
Artress Bethany White, associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University,
is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for
her poetry collection My Afmerica: 
poems (Trio House Press, 2019). Her prose, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity, received a 2022 Next Generation Finalist Indie Book Award. Recent work appears in
the anthology Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creativity and Craft (McFarland, 2023). White has received scholarships and residencies from the Sewanee
Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf. For more information visit her website: artressbethanywhite.com
Pop-Up Poetry Spring Festival
April 14-15
Patricia Smith - Keynote
Celebrating National Poetry Month, we embrace Renaissance! Our gathering is infused by hope, cast in appreciation for the possibilities inherent in the rigors of creating, the craft of revising, the challenge of teaching, the rewards of learning, and the joy of performing and publishing poetry for both new and established poets. We hope you join our two-day event in April with Patricia Smith as Keynote Speaker (bio), the Spencer Undergraduate Poetry Awards ceremony, outdoor readings, and much more on the beautiful West Chester University campus.
Schedule of Events:
Sunday, April 14th
Grades 3-12 Poetry Contest Award Ceremony - 2pm - SECC Room 108
New Works Panel Presentation: We Come Bearing Gifts: New Books from Four Midwestern
Poets
with Lee Bahan, Daniel Bourne, John Drury, and Allison Joseph
3:30pm - SECC Room 108 (check back soon for hybrid zoom link)
Lee Bahan is the author of three chapbooks, Migration Solo, Notes to Sing, and To Wrestle with the Angel. Her first book of Petrarch translations, A Year of Mourning, was a special honoree for the 2016 Able Muse Book Award. Her second, Advent and Lent, also has been accepted by Able Muse Press. Lee's poems, translations, and prose
have appeared in Able Muse, Artful Dodge, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review,
The North American Review, Ploughshares, and Think Journal. She lives with her husband Pat in a hundred-year-old farmhouse outside Medora, IN.
Daniel Bourne was raised on a farm near the Little Wabash River in southeastern Illinois, and for
years worked in a rare book library at Indiana University. His books of poetry include
The Household Gods, Where No One Spoke the Language, and On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe, a collection of translations of the political poetry and essays of Polish poet Tomasz
Jastrun. Other poems and translations from Polish appear in such journals as Ploughshares, Guernica, American Poetry Review, Field, Salmagundi, Plume and Cimarron Review. Over the years, 
his stays in Poland have included a Fulbright Fellowship for translation in 1985-87
and a graduate exchange program between Indiana and Warsaw University during Martial
Law in 1982-1983. Most recently, he spent part of 2013 and 2014 in Poland to continue
his translation work as well as some writing projects involving Polish environmental
issues, including the primeval forest of Bialowieża and the island of Sobieszewo on
the Baltic Coast just to the east of Gdańsk. He teaches at The College of Wooster,
where he edits Artful Dodge.
John Philip Drury is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies (Able Muse Press, 2024). A book of creative nonfiction, Bobby and
Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in August 2024. He was born in Cambridge,
Maryland, and grew up in Bethesda. He earned degrees from Stony Brook
University, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for thirty-seven years, he is now an
emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old
house on the edge of a wooded ravine.
Photo Credit: Tess Despres Weinberg
Monday, April 15th
Pop-Up Poetry Day!
Join WCU Students and Faculty on the Academic Quad beginning at 10:00am to visit activity tables and impromptu pop-up poetry readings on the stage. All are welcome to join the fun!
Master Class with Ernest Hilbert
“All is Silver”: Poetry and the Evocation of Place
“All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering
spilling over.” When Elizabeth Bishop described a gray winter seaside in these terms,
she immediately transported her readers to the place where the speaker of her poem
stood and looked out on the scene. What techniques allow a poet to evoke a particular
place persuasively and memorably? It may be a city, a 
house, a room, a tower, a tomb. It may be in a distant future or recalled from the
past, a place one inhabits daily or one that is fantastically far away. It can be
as small as a desk or a dinner table, as vast as a landscape or a planet seen from
space. The possibilities are as intriguing as they are vast. In this workshop we will
explore the ways in which a poet can conjure the sensation of being in a place that
may be beautiful, unsettling, terrifying, ugly, calming; a place summoned from memory
or cast purely from imagination. We will work on poems that capture places and build
scenes. The visual cues may be strongly symbolic or merely exist in their own rights,
but the place may seem real. Following a short introductory lecture by the workshop
leader, you will use discussion and a series of prompts to work on your own poem,
which you may share with others during the session, if you like. You will come away
from the workshop with new skills and new ways of thinking, as well as a poem to continue
working on. No previous experience is necessary. Email Dr. Cherise Pollard for more information.