Internationally renowned poet and masterclass leader, Craig Czury, is coming back to Norwich to present a Life-Writing Workshop and Poetry Reading on Sunday, March 22, 2020. The Life-Writing Workshop will be from 2:00-3:30 pm, followed by the interactive Poetry Reading from 4:00-5:00 pm. The event is $10 for both the workshop and reading and will take place at the Chenango Arts Council located at 27 West Main Street, Norwich NY 13815.

Just back from a European Tour where he was awarded the Alexander the Great Gold Medal for Arts and Letters in Greece, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in Italy, Craig Czury will be teaching the art of writing to workshop attendees. Helping people to access their inner voice and to write personally and profoundly is what Czury has done for well over three decades. He studied with some of the top poets on the national and international scene in his youth, and later turned to publishing books of poetry and making public poetry happen in often-overlooked venues like prisons, homeless shelters, juvenile detention centers and mental hospitals, in addition to scores of schools and universities.

“Poetry is not a spectator sport,” Czury is famous for saying, and both his poetry and masterclasses prove it. He shows writers and aspiring writers how to access words that come from places that only they know – their own personal experiences, their own inheritances of culture and family environment, their own secret spaces. Czury’s own poetry is multi-faceted, dark and dug up from way down deep, coming as it does from his early years growing up in the declining anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania’s northeast. “I write from my abandoned spaces, my broken windows, my dying towns, my way of knowing that something is lost,” he says. Czury did not stay in the coal region, but hitchhiked across the US for fifteen years in his youth, and later traveled across the globe as a featured poet at International Poetry Festivals. He is also an editor, publisher, and tireless arts advocate, and the author of over 20 books of poetry.

Czury currently lives and writes for some of the year in his native Pennsylvania and the other part of the year writing and teaching in Europe. The Poetry Reading will feature selections from his published books as well as new work written in Greece, Lithuania and Albania.

No writing experience is necessary to take part in the Life-Writing Workshop, which will be held Sunday, March 22, 2020 at The Chenango Arts Council at 27 West Main Street in Norwich. Please call 607- 336-ARTS to reserve your seat or visit www.chenangoarts.org

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.