March’s featured writer is longtime Just Poet’s member Roy Bent.
Roy sometimes has trouble deciding what to do. In eight years at Penn State (his mother thought he would never come home) he took simultaneous bachelor’s degrees in Writing and Architecture, acted in a dozen Reader’s Theater productions, ran track and cross-country (in the process getting his ass kicked by three different Olympians), then worked two years for Penn State as an architectural engineering assistant. He finally escaped Penn State’s Happy Valley by taking an MBA, an idea he got from a friend while they were drinking French 75’s using all the money they’d just earned as theater ushers.
He was the only person in his MBA program that took graduate novel writing on the side. His advisor, the novelist Paul West, told him to go out into the world and get some real life experience while thinking up his next book. Roy took Paul a little too seriously, spending decades in business, writing mostly contracts and presentations. In retrospect, Roy says many of those turned out to be speculative Science Fiction. He spent sixteen years at Kodak in a series of increasingly responsible financial positions, culminating as a divisional Strategic Planning Director, for businesses which continue as part of the British company Kodak Alaris.
After leaving Kodak, he was one of three partners who built an $8 million dollar document processing business. After selling his part of the company, in between occasional consulting jobs Roy returned to creative writing. For a playwriting contest (which he lost), he dusted off a one-act play he wrote and produced in college that included reciting a poem. While reworking it, he replaced the original script’s Robert Bridges poem with a new one of his own. 400 poems later, here we are, still waiting for that second novel, and the screenplay he occasionally talks about….
Roy Hartwell Bent
—-Don't forget to bring some poems of your own to share during the open mic portion of the event. Usually readers are allowed 1-3 poems, for a total of three minutes.—-
The series is curated by Just Poet David Yockel.