The Bucks County Community College Wordsmiths Reading Series continues this spring by welcoming acclaimed poets Thomas Devaney and Lisa Sewell who will read their new works on Friday, February 21 at 7:30 p.m. in room 142 of the historic Tyler Hall on the Newtown Campus. The event is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing and dessert reception.
Thomas Devaney is a Pew Fellow in the Arts and author of five books, including Getting to Philadelphia (Hanging Loose Press), Calamity Jane (Furniture Press), and The Picture that Remains, a collaboration with photographer Will Brown (The Philadelphia Print Center). He wrote and co-directed the film “Bicentennial City,” exploring the legacy of Philadelphia’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. Devaney’s work has been published in Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. The literary hub “Blue Stoop: A Home for Philly Writers” was named after his poem “The Blue Stoop.”
Submitted: BCCC
For twelve years, Devaney taught creative writing at Haverford College. He now works at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, where he recently completed a master’s degree in urban design. His thesis, “Reimagining Urban Parks: Philadelphia’s FDR Park as a Space for People and Nature” (2024), reflects his ongoing engagement with urban spaces and explores the intersection of people and place through civic storytelling.
Lisa Sewell is the author of The Way Out (Alice James Books), Name Withheld (Four Way Books), Long Corridor, which received the 2009 Keystone Chapbook award from Seven Kitchens Press, Impossible Object, which won the 2014 Tenth Gate prize from The Word Works Press, and Birds of North America (Drawing Room), a collaboration with artist Susan Hagen and poet Nathalie Anderson. A new book of poems, Flood Plain, was just published by Grid Books. She is co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan 2007), Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America (Wesleyan 2012), and North American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language (Wesleyan 2021) with Kazim Ali.
Submitted: BCCC
Sewell has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso, The Tyrone Guthrie Center and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at Villanova University.
The final reading of the spring series will feature Carolyn Kuebler on Thursday, April 3 at 12:30 p.m. in 142 Tyler Hall.