Bursk, Christopher
Born: April 23, 1943, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Vocations: Professor, Poet, Activist
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: Langhorne Manor, Bucks County

Keywords: 49th Parallel Poetry Award; Boston University; Bucks County Citizen of the Year; Bucks County Community College; Bucks County Humanitarian of the Year; Capricorn Poetry Award; Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Pew Fellowship; Poet Laureate of Bucks County; Public Poetry Project; Shaw University; Tufts University; Warren Wilson College

Abstract: Poet Christopher Bursk, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1943, is currently a professor of language and literature at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He has won a number of awards for his poetry and for his humanitarian efforts.

Biography:

Poet Christopher Bursk was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 23, 1943 to Edward and Catherine Bursk. He received his B.A. from Tufts University in 1965, his Ph.D. from Boston University in 1975, and his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in 1988. He married Mary Ann Adzarito in 1967, and they had three children — Christian, Norabeth, and Justin.

Bursk was a professor at Shaw University in North Carolina from 1968 to 1969, but then moved on to teach language and literature at Bucks County Community College in 1970. In 1978, Bursk published his first volume of poetry, entitled Standing Watch, and was named Bucks County’s Poet Laureate, an award that prompted him to teach a creative writing course at Bucks County prison. This volunteering experience, one that he has continued for over thirty years, has inspired his craft. Bursk, who claims that “poetry is the only argument I know to offer against prison and all it represents,” based his poetry collection, Cell Count, on his volunteer work in the correctional system.

Aside from volunteering as a teacher at the Bucks County prison, Bursk also donates his time to food banks and women’s shelters. He acknowledges this fact in his third collection of poems, Places of Comfort, Places of Justice, which was dedicated to A Woman’s Place, a shelter for the victims of domestic abuse. According to The Virginia Quarterly Review, in the book, Bursk’s “painful… near-Gothic” poetry brings readers back “to the wellsprings of [Bursk’s] search for comfort and justice—the need to compensate, mostly in the realm of wishful imagination, for a childhood shadowed by his mother’s madness.”

Bursk admits that he writes poetry based upon a theme, which sets him apart from many other poets. Bursk acknowledges, “I find I write books - I don’t write poems.” These themes, often inspired by the social issues he supports, lend Bursk’s poetry an extra layer of compassion and understanding. On balancing his time between writing and social activism, Bursk says “It’s always been a [question] in my life how much I dare give myself permission to write. People are struggling. . . . How dare I write? I should be out working for social change, counseling and raising money.” He credits his interest in social activism to his mother, who was institutionalized in the 1940s yet still continued to volunteer: “Seeing my mother in pain helped me to be open to others in pain. In my poetry, as in my activism, I wanted to fight that.” To help further his goals for social change, Bursk donates some of the profits earned from his books to social organizations.

Bursk’s unique blend of poetry and activism have garnered him numerous accolades. In 1983, Bursk won a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship; a year later, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; and in 1987 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1994, Bursk won the Capricorn Poetry Award, and the following year, he won a Pew Fellowship. In 2003, Bursk’s poetry collection Ovid at Fifteen won the Green Rose Prize and the Another Chicago Magazine Award. In 2004, Bursk’s The Improbable Swervings of Atoms received the Donald Hall prize in poetry, which offers publication to the best book-length manuscript of poetry. It also received the Milton Kessler Poetry Book Award in 2006. Bursk’s “E Pluribus Unum” won the 49th Parallel Poetry Award, sponsored by the Bellingham Review, in 2004. In 2007, Bursk was the first prize winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize for The First Inhabitants of Arcadia, and his work, “Does Poetry Matter?” was chosen for inclusion in the Pennsylvania Center for the Book’s Public Poetry Project. Bursk has also been honored as both the humanitarian and the citizen of the year for Bucks County.

Bursk’s poetry has received much acclaim; Joel Brouwer’s assessment in the New York Times Book Review helps to explain why: “…Bursk writes with verve and insight about child rearing, aging parents, sexuality, his literary heroes, the sexuality of his literary heroes…his work with prisoners and victims of domestic abuse, the war in Iraq and much else, but his underlying subjects are as basic as they come: the ‘first inhabitants’ of his title, poetry’s molecules and atoms, words and letters.” Bursk, who affirms that he “could not live without writing” has been published in Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Manhattan Review, and the Sun. At present, he lives in Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania with his family.

Works:

• Standing Watch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978.
• Place of Residence. West Lafayette, IN: Sparrow Press, 1983.
• Places of Comfort, Places of Justice. San Jose, CA: Humanities and Arts Press, 1987.
• The Way Water Rubs Stone. Washington, DC: Word Works, 1988.
• Cell Count. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 1997.
• Ovid at Fifteen. Kalamazoo, MI: New Issues/Western Michigan University, 2003.
• The Improbable Swervings of Atoms. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2005.
• The First Inhabitants of Arcadia. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2006.

Sources:

• “Bellingham Review: Contests.” Bellingham Review. 7 Oct. 2009. <http://www.wwu.edu/bhreview/index.shtml>.
• Brouwer, Joel. “The First Inhabitants of Arcadia: Poems.” New York Times Book Review 23 Apr. 2006: 17.
• “Christopher Bursk.” Pew Fellowships in the Arts. 7 Oct. 2009. <http://www.pewarts.org/index.html>.
• Harris, Peter. “Poetry Chronicle: Whole Volumes: Quality of Vision in the Work of Sadoff, Bursk, and Hoffmann.” Virginia Quarterly Review 65.2 (1989): 235-47.
• McCrary, Lacy. “Another Poet Laureate Presides: Bucks Chooses a Vietnam Veteran for its Annual Honor.” The Philadelphia Enquirer 30 Sept. 1983: B06.
• “Poetry Reading by Winners of 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize.” The Italian Voice 76.33 (2008): 1.
• Reed, Valerie. “Poetry with a conscience - Professor, writer is committed to working for social change. Snapshot: Christopher Bursk.” The Philadelphia Enquirer 20 Oct. 2002: L03.
• “Winners of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, 2004 AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, the Novel, & Short Fiction.” The Association of Writers and Writing Programs. 7 Oct. 2009. <http://www.awpwriter.org/>.

This biography was prepared by Rachel Trosino, Spring 2007, and by Lindley Homol, Fall 2009.