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