Poets In Play All Day

Poets In Play All Day
Saturday, April 26, 10am - 5pm
Poetry Readings, Workshops, and More!

The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes (The ARTS Council) and FootHills Publishing present Poets in Play All Day on Saturday, April 26, 2025, from 10am – 5pm, at 79 West Market St., Corning, NY. Come for the whole day or part of the day. No registration is required; this event is free and open to the public!

Join us for a full day of poetry in celebration of National Poetry Month and Poets in Play’s 10th season with poetry readings, workshops, food, and conversation. There will be three featured readings, two open mic readings, and one writing workshop throughout the day. Featured readers are GS Murphy, Tamar Samuel-Siegel, and special guest, Sweden Beat Poet Laureate Bengt O Björklund. Craig Czury will facilitate a Poem Fusion Workshop and performance. A potluck lunch is planned, so bring along some light food to share if you are able. Electrical outlets are available for crock pot.

Schedule:

•  9:30am: Doors open
•  10-10:30am: Open reading
•  10:30-10:50am: Break and snacks
•  10:50-11:20am: Featured reading with GS Murphy
•  11:20-11:50am: Featured reading with Bengt O Björklund #1
•  11:50am-12:50pm: Lunch break
•  12:50-2:20pm: Workshop with Craig Czury
•  2:20-2:40pm: Break and Snacks
•  2:40-3:20pm: Featured reading with Tamar Samuel-Siegel
•  3:20-3:40pm: Break and snacks
•  3:40-4:00pm: Workshop reading with Craig Czury
•  4:00-4:30pm: Featured reading with Bengt O Björklund #2
•  4:30-5:00pm: Open reading

About the poets:

 Swedish Bengt O Björklund wrote his first poem in a jail cell in Istanbul in 1969. The Turkish police had kicked in his hotel door and busted him for thirty grams of hash he had bought from a Turkish man for 20 bucks earlier that night at the end of 1968.

Due to the fact that no one spoke Swedish in jail he started to write in English. When he was released in 1973 he kept on writing in both his mother tongue Swedish and in English.

In 2018 he was named Swedish Beat Poet Laureate for life by National Beat Poetry Foundation. Recently “If There Is No Tomorrow”, his sixth poetry collection in English, was published in the US.

Bengt is also an artist and a percussionist in the band Beat Poet Society.

https://artandmore.store/

“Bengt O Björklund is one of the preeminent Beat poets of our time and his “If There Is No Tomorrow” ranks among his best work. I love his wordplay, his insight, and the deft balance of surreal and all-too-real as his word waves erode artifice to reveal higher truth and deeper experience.” —John Burroughs, 2022-2023 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate and author of Rattle and Numb

 GS Murphy is an educator working the healthcare and addictions field in upstate New York. He is an avid poet, motorcyclist, and coffee snob. He lives with his wife and young pup. Sometimes he thinks his DNA is part hound-dog. He has had two books of poetry published by FootHills, the most recent being When Blood isn't enough.

“GS Murphy has written trauma therapy in verse, a harrowing psychic and spiritual exercise that reopens and examines wounds, pulls demons into sunlight and interrogates them. When Blood isn't enough is relentless, disturbing, at times excruciating testimony. On this battlefield of family history surprising graces occur: a backyard tree develops a tumor in sympathy with his mother's, and when her lovely hair eventually grew back, long enough to braid, "the willow's weeping leaves also grew back /and concealed me when I wanted to hide." An adult poet emerges from nightmares a vulnerable survivor of trauma. Murphy understands the deep, abiding need for a place of refuge. Readers (and survivors) can find it in his brave offering of witness and solidarity.” —Bart White, The Art of Restoration (Jules Poetry Playhouse Publications, 2022)

 Tamar Samuel-Siegel is a co-founder of the Poets in Play Reading Series. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Purchase College, where, alongside poem-making, she learned to draw trees & dance on park benches. In 2018, she received her MA in TESOL from Tel Aviv University. Her research then wended through storytelling, translation, and empathy. Tamar returns to Corning and to Poets In Play, still moved by the nights when we closed our eyes in communal gratitude for the magic of our creative collective.

 Craig Czury (poet, editor, arts advocate) is from the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania and the author of over 20 books of poetry. A 2022 Fulbright Scholar to Chile, Craig was awarded Laureate of the 2011 Ditët e Naimit International Albanian Poetry Festival, and the following year he received the F. Lammot Belin Scholarship for Artists.

Craig Czury’s Poem Fusions transform our private poetry voices into a multi-voice public conversation, extending the written page into performance. They have become stage plays, radio plays, reader’s theater, 10-minute plays, dance/poetry fusions, poetry murals, jazz texts, flamenco texts, cross-cultural, bilingual, intergenerational.

The Poem Fusion process...reading, listening, writing from what’s heard from our lives inside us while listening, exchanging, editing, deconstructing, collaging, reconstructing, reading, choreographing, directing, performing... At each phase, participants are totally active in their own personal writing and in making collaborative decisions.

www.craigczury.com