Lake Angela, of Warrington, has been named the 2024 Bucks County Poet Laureate. It was recently announced by Ethel Rackin, Ph.D., director of the Poet Laureate program and professor at Bucks County Community College who administers the program on behalf of the college. The contest is sponsored by the Bucks County Commissioners.
Angela, a published poet, translator and dance choreographer, rose to the top of more than 50 entries in the 48th annual contest. She holds a Ph.D. 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. She is the director of the poetry-dance group Companyia Lake Angela. 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, 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. Some of her work can be viewed at lakeangeladance.com. She 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 read her poetry on Saturday, Nov. 16, at 1 p.m. in room 142 of the historic Tyler Hall on the Newtown Campus. She read with 2023 Laureate Tara Tamburello, and they were joined by three runners-up, Robbin Farr, Madeline Marriott and Judith Adams Lagana. Devaney also read.
The Bucks County Poet Laureate program is the longest-running such program in Pennsylvania. Email Rackin at ethel.rackin@bucks.edu for more information.
