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Don Riggs

Don Riggs first performed a work of poetry on Christmas Eve, 1961, when he recited the entire “Night Before Christmas” from memory at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Silver Spring, Md.  He first published his own poetry in The Pine Cone, the newspaper of Pine Crest Elementary School, in spring 1964.  His writing and performing finally fused in the mid-1970s Poetry Reading Renaissance in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he was influenced by the Beats and Robert Bly – both in performance style and poetic style.  He has since experimented with a number of different poetic modes, focusing most recently on The Sonnet.  He currently teaches at Drexel University in Philadelphia and reads at various venues in that city.