Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets
The Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, the Stadler Center’s renowned summer poetry program, will return in June 2025. Now a one-week residential program, the Seminar provides emerging poets time and space for reading, writing, discussion, and the opportunity to study with established poets. In the past, such poets as Kaveh Akbar, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Carl Phillips, Mary Ruefle, and Jean Valentine have served as visiting poets. Numerous readings provide the participants with the opportunity to hear and be heard by their peers. Accepted applicants receive free tuition, lodging, meals, and a travel stipend. Undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities who will complete their sophomore, junior, or senior year in the year of application are eligible to apply. Applicants compete for ten places in the Seminar.
The 2025 Seminar will be directed by Jessica Nirvana Ram, the Center's Publicity & Outreach Manager and author of the forthcoming poetry collection Earthly Gods. The 2025 faculty will include visiting poets Chen Chen and Diamond Forde. Dates for the 39th Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets are June 8–15, 2025. The application deadline is Jan. 31, 2025. For eligibility and application requirements, and to submit an application, please see our application portal. The portal will open on Oct. 1, 2024.
The 39th Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets will include the following faculty and staff:
![Chen Chen](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_square_left/public/2024-07/stadler_chen_chen.jpg?h=6246e855)
Chen Chen's second poetry collection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is available from BOA Editions. His first book of essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025.
![Dr. Diamond Forde](/sites/default/files/styles/wysiwyg_square_left/public/2024-08/dr_diamond_forde.jpg?h=15b8bdf3)
Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (forthcoming with Scribner Books, 2025-26). Forde has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, nomination as a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist, and earned a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship.
Jessica Nirvana Ram is the author of the debut poetry collection Earthly Gods and the chapbook in the aftermath. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, amongst others.