Former U.S. Poet Laureate to Read at BCCC

Charles Simic, the 15th Poet Laureate of the United States, will share his award-winning poetry this Friday at Bucks County Community College's Newtown Campus. The event, which is part of the Wordsmiths Reading Series, begins at 7:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public. 

Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Simic emigrated to the U.S. in 1953 at the age of 15. He has lived in New York City, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire, where he was a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. The poet, essayist, and translator has been honored with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator and a MacArthur Fellowship.

He served as the country's Poet Laureat from 2007 to 2008.

Simic has published numerous collections of poems, among them, Master of Disguises (2010); Selected Poems:1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; and The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Simic's reading takes place in the Orangery on the Newtown Campus.

The Wordsmiths Reading Series is sponsored by college’s Cultural Task Force and Cultural Programming Committee, as well as by the Language and Literature Department. For more information, contact Dr. Ethel Rackin at 215-497-8719 or rackine@bucks.edu.