Latest Bucks County Poet Laureate Named

Provided by Bucks County Community College:

Lake Angela, of Warrington Township, has been named the 2024 Bucks County Poet Laureate, announced the director of the Poet Laureate program and professor at Bucks County Community College, Dr. Ethel Rackin.

Angela, a published poet, translator, and dance choreographer, rose to the top of more than 50 entries in the 48^th annual contest, said Dr. Rackin who administers the program on behalf of the College. The contest is supported by the Bucks County Commissioners.

Angela holds a PhD in intersemiotic translation and is a medieval mystic. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, BODY, The Common, Passages North, and Poetry Salzburg Review, among others; her books include Organblooms, Words for the Dead, and Scivias Choreomaniae. She is the director of the poety-dance group Companyia Lake Angela, and her current hobbies involve exchanging multimedia dialogues with disabilities advocacy artists and translating poetry into movement to further her project of illuminating the creative potential of schizophrenia-spectrum associative thinking.

Residing in Warrington, Pennsylvania, Angela works alongside poet Sara Ries Dziekonski as Poetry Midwives, part of the nonprofit literary organization Keep St. Pete Lit that assists writers around the world. Her current hobbies involve exchanging multimedia dialogues with disabilities advocacy artists and translating poetry into movement to further her project of illuminating the creative potential of schizophrenia-spectrum associative thinking; she invites you to view some of this work at www.lakeangeladance.com. Lake also collaborates with her spouse, writer and multimedia artist Kevin Richard Kaiser, and their baby, Quixot, who likes to compose atonal music for their performance projects.

The judges of this year’s Poet Laureate competition were Philadelphia poet Thomas Devaney, and Catskills, New York poet, Kasey Jueds. Both judges commented on the strength of this year’s entries.

Angela will be reading her poetry on Saturday, November 16 at 1 p.m. in room 142 of the historic Tyler Hall on the Newtown Campus. Click to view the campus map. She will be reading with 2023 Laureate Tara Tamburello, and they will be joined by our three runners-up, Robbin Farr, Madeline Marriott, and Judith Adams Lagana. Thomas Devaney will also be reading.

The Bucks County Poet Laureate program — the longest-running such program in Pennsylvania — is another way that Bucks County Community College contributes to the cultural heritage of the region.

For more information, contact program director Dr. Ethel Rackin at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu.

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