This event will feature readings by:

Ray Greenblatt
Bill Van Buskirk

Open mic to follow. Hosted by Sibelan Forrester

Whether this event will be virtual or in person TBA

Community Arts Center
414 Plush Mill Road
Wallingford PA 19086

Bill Van Buskirk has been a meter reader, model, professional gambler, management consultant, a Buddhist, a construction worker, community organizer, drug counselor, pacifist, university professor and step-father. Most of these adventures have found their way into his poems, which he loves to send out for publication. Sometimes they are accepted which makes him feel really good—like the whole world loves him. Most times they aren’t. He has two books of poetry: /Everything that’s Fragile is Important/ and /This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law/. He believes that poetry can be a kind of magic-in-language that captures energies that hum and shine outside our day jobs—like humor, awe, hope, gratitude, wonder, mournfulness, wisdom, memory, ghosts, stillness and silence. When he was ten, a nun told him he was born on Shakespeare’s birthday. When he was eighteen he took a vow to never be bored again (That one got him into a lot of trouble.) He’s been married three times: one annulment, one death, one divorce. When he was nineteen he decided to talk to everybody about important things. He made a lot of friends on the bus to school. But people started looking at him funny so he stopped. He learned a little bit about violence on the street. It wasn’t for him. When he was twenty he found out who Shakespeare was. He was impressed. When he was twenty-three he had a little son who died after one day on earth. When he was thirty he decided he needed a career. He doesn’t remember much of what happened after that.

Ray Greenblatt has been poet-in-residence at Downingtown High School, Haverford High School, Springfield High and Penn Charter. He has read his poetry from a barn in Vermont to a senior center in Miami. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize a number of times and was Mad Poets Poet-of-the-Year for 2021. He sat on the board of the Philadelphia Writers Conference and is an editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

He teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple University-OLLI. Making himself super busy in Covid time, he published two books: UNTIL THE FIRST LIGHT (Parnilis Media) and MAN IN A CROW SUIT (BookArts Press). He has written nearly fifty book reviews, mostly looking for poetic techniques in novels. Ray says he is reading with Bill Van Buskirk because “he wants to benefit from the influence of an older man.”