Bensalem Woman Dubbed Bucks County's Poet Laureate

Laren McClung of Bensalem has been named the 2016 Bucks County Poet Laureate, officials at Bucks County Community College announced.

McClung, a Bucks alumna who now holds two master’s degrees and teaches at New York University, rose to the top of 88 entries in the 40th annual contest, Dr. Christopher Bursk, co-director of the poet laureate program administered by the college, said. The contest is sponsored by the Bucks County Commissioners.

McClung will be honored with a poetry reading and reception at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, at Bucks’ Newtown campus, Bursk said. The reading and reception will be held in the Orangery building on the college's campus at 275 Swamp Rd., Newtown, Pa., 18940. Admission and parking are free.

After attending Bucks, McClung earned a BA and MA from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., and an MFA from New York University. She is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow Press), and editor of the anthology Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2017.

McCung has earned several awards for her writing, including fellowships from Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She has led writing workshops with residents at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, New York, and with veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has taught in the Prison Education Program. Her work has been published in many journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Cerise Press, The American Reader, PN Review, and War, Literature and the Arts.

"These astonishing poems enact a kind of re-incarnation, retrieving histories of the natural and the built world, of ancient ritual, and of language so they come alive again to mingle in the present world, palpable in the continuous present that art creates," judge and poet J.C. Todd said of the winning entries. "Although they are dense with language, the lines are musical; their cadence unspools images in a kind of cinema vérité."

The judges also named three runners-up in the contest: Jenny Isaacs of Doylestown; Steve Nolan of Newtown; and Kyra Juliet Spence of Newtown. They’ve been invited to read at the November 13 reception, along with 2015 Bucks County Poet Laureate Tyler Kline of Chalfont.

In addition to the inaugural reading and reception, McClung will be honored with a $500 honorarium and a proclamation from the Bucks County Commissioners.

Reflecting on the 40th annual contest, Bursk, the program’s co-director and a past poet laureate, said the program attracts a wide range of writers.

“Past laureates have come from all lines of work – postal worker, marketing consultant, copy editor, artist, television producer, actor, teacher, farm worker, prison counselor – and from all ages – from 22 to 75,” said Bursk. “Some have had published widely before being chosen laureate, some only rarely. What all have shared is a commitment to their craft and a delight at being able to serve Bucks County as its laureate.”

For more information on the Bucks County Poet Laureate program, contact program co-directors Dr. Christopher Bursk at (215) 968-8156 or Dr. Ethel Rackin at (215) 497-8719.

Image via Bucks County Community College