Words and Music 2023

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Erin Murphy, Poet Laureate of Blair County, is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Taxonomies, Fields of Ache: Centos, and the forthcoming Human Resources. Her awards include the 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, The Normal School Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. 

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, among others. She has had works published internationally in numerous literary magazines, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times Magazine, etc., and her poetry has won several awards, including the Crab Orchard Award and the Liberian Award. Mostly recently, she is the recipient of the prestigious 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for her book Praise Song for My Children

Lee Peterson is the author of Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia and In the Hall of North American Mammals (forthcoming from Cider Press Review), and the chapbook The Needles Road (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press). Peterson's writing centers on issues of human rights, displacement and migration, motherhood, and the lived experiences of women and girls. 

Singer/songwriter Eric Ian Farmer comes equipped with an acoustic guitar, an energized uplifting style, and songs about social awareness, relationships -- mostly the struggling kind -- and finding one's path in life. 

Sharing her songwriting as Raven and the Wren, Natty Lou Race connects with her listeners through lyrics laced with the deepest themes of the human experience; the fragility of life, death, and the inevitable heartaches and heartbreaks they bear.

Andy Tolins is an exceptional guitarist with a rich deep-toned voice and a gift for telling lyrics and melodies rooted in blues and folk tradition. It is fair to say that Andy is a favorite and staple on the regional music scene, his range as a performer running from bluegrass and blues to swing and R&B.  

Todd Davis, a frequent contributor to Appalachia and Orion over the past two decades, is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species. He is a teacher of environmental studies, and his poetry is most often grounded in his insightful observations of nature. One critic described Todd's “truest gift” as “that unique ability to link, in a single sentence, the natural world we’ve become increasingly isolated from to the unnatural world many of us now view as natural.” 

Jon Rounds is a veteran of two seminal State College bands, the Rounds Brothers and Cartoon. He writes captivating story songs that take listeners on an emotional ride and performs in a style as attractively warm as a campfire. Among his favorite moments as an artist is playing his original songs at the legendary songwriter-in-the-round shows at Nashville's famed Bluebird Cafe. His songs have been performed and recorded by dozens of other artists.