The Gray Hair Poetry Series

Roy Bent is a poet who has been a successful businessman, first at Eastman Kodak and later at Mail Technologies, a company he started in 1991. He began competing in poetry and prose "Extemporaneous Speaking" contests in junior high. By the time he graduated from high school, he ranked seventh in the State of Pennsylvania for Extemporaneous Speaking. He turned from his interest in speaking to theater when he attended college at Penn State. He wrote and directed a play and performed in nearly twenty reader's theater productions, ranging from John Barth's End of the Road to The Pirates of Penzance. He graduated from Penn State in 1977 with a BS in Architecture and a BA in English. After working for the university as an architectural assistant, he received an MBA in 1980. Although he still occasionally works as a business consultant, he has been busy writing and performing. In the last 15 months he has performed his poetry as featured reader in Raleigh NC, Philadelphia, Toronto, Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, and elsewhere.

Peggy Towers earned her MA in Creative Writing at UB. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Language and Culture, Mom Writer, The Black Mountain Review, Terra Poetica, The Buffalo News, Buffalo Press and other publications. She was the Just Buffalo Writer in Residence in Poetry in 1985. She was semifinalist for the James Jones First Novel Contest in 2003, Just Buffalo Writer in Residence Honorable Mention in Fiction in 2001, and a semi-finalist in poetry in the New York State Creative Artists' Public Service Program in 1983. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1986. Towers attended Los Parronales Writers' Retreat in Santiago, Chile in 2012. She had a Fellowship in Poetry at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006. This year she has been attending the Advanced Poetry Workshop at the famed 92nd Street Y in NYC. In the summer of 2004, she was a Participant in Sewanee Writers' Conference in Fiction. In 2001, she was a fellow in the WNY Writing Project Summer Institute at Canisius College. Additionally, she has been an editor of ASPIRE Newsletter (2000-2002) and Buffalo Equestrian Center Newsletter (1999-2002). She was one of the founding editors of Buffalo Press, which published Anthology I and three chapbooks of Western New York Writers (1989-90). She also holds a BS from UB in Physical Therapy, and has been an avid runner for over 3 decades, completing five marathons, including the Boston Marathon.