Member
Nassau County Poet Laureate for 2009-11 and the Walt Whitman Birthplace 2016 Poet of the Year, Gayl Teller is author of 7 poetry collections, most recently, Flashlight: New and Selected Poems (WordTech/ Cherry Grove Collections, 2019) and the editor of two poetry anthologies— Toward Forgiveness (Writers Ink, 2011): awarded a NY State Decentralization Grant for the Arts, and Corona: An Anthology of Poems (Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, 2020). Director of the Poetry Series at the Mid-Island Y, in Plainview, for 25 years and a Hofstra University professor, she was selected as the Seventh Quarry Press Poet of the Month for February, 2022, in Swansea, Wales, and she has been the recipient of the Westmoreland Arts & Heritage Poetry Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Prize, a National League of American PEN Women Prize, the Peninsula Library Poetry Prize, a National Federation of State Poetry Societies Prize, the Artists Embassy International Poetry Award, and others. Her website: www.gaylteller.com
Member
Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions. His novel Haywire won the members’ choice award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Columbia University, and a YMCA and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. www.thaddeusrutkowski.com
Member
Nina (Nanette) Yavel’s poetry has appeared in several collected works and international publications--Beyond Words, Bitterroot, An anthology of International Poetry; Nassau County Poet Laureate Review, Paumanok Transition. She was awarded first prize for poetry competitions sponsored by Barnes and Noble, The Owl in Garden City, The Park Slope Press and The Mac Street Journal. She helped found the Poets of Well Being. Her short story “Pinocle Game” and poem “Eve” were included in Risk Courage and Woman, a prize-winning anthology which featured Maya Angelou and other woman writers.
Member
v.j.(Vinnie) Calone, formalist poet. Vincent's a poet/dramatist. BA SUNY Oswego '95. He studied under Lewis Turco author, of The New Book of Forms. Vince’s poems have appeared in The Long Island Sounds Anthology, The Suffolk County Poetry Review, The Chiron Review, Atom Mind, Long Island Quarterly, Poetry X Hunger, and PoARTry among others. v.j.’s also the submission editor at THE SCENE poetry/art zine, a monthly magazine which covers poetry and the poetry scene from the bridges to the forks on Long Island. Lastly, he’s host of the GREEN SPACE poetry open mic every first Tuesday in Rocky Point, NY where he lives.