HUDSON VALLEY WRITERS CENTER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet and visual artist born in Santa Rosa, California. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, DMQ Review, Tule Review, The Night Heron Barks, THINK Journal, Louisiana Literature, Naugatuck River Review, and elsewhere. He earned his MFA from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry.
Ann Bookman is a poet, anthropologist and social justice advocate. She has been studying poetry for twenty years with Boston area poets and in residential workshops at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her poems have been published in Chronogram, Larcom Review and Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, among others. In 2012 she published a chapbook, Point of Attachment, with Finishing Line Press. Her first full collection, Blood Lines, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.
Bookman has held a number of research and teaching positions in the academy, including Brandeis University, MIT and the College of the Holy Cross. A nationally known scholar and policy expert in women's issues, work/family balance and community engagement, she has published widely in scholarly journals and is the co-author with Sandra Morgen of Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Temple University Press) and the author of Starting in Our Own Backyards: How working families can build community and survive the new economy (Routledge).
Bookman has also worked in government. She was a Presidential Appointee during the Clinton administration, serving as Policy and Research Director of the Women's Bureau at the US Department of Labor and as Executive Director of the bipartisan Commission on Family and Medical Leave.
Her career has been bookended by positions focused on women's creativity, potential and power. Early in her career she served as Associate Director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College working with an interdisciplinary group of women scholars, writers and artists. From 2013 through 2018, she was Director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at UMass Boston weaving an intersectional feminist perspective into her teaching, research and activism.
She is currently a Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Community Affairs Coordinator
Christina Papadopoulos has been with HVWC since 2017. She holds a BA from Trinity College in Public Policy and Environmental Studies, a Masters of Public Administration from NYU, and a law degree from St. John's University.
Christina Papadopoulos has been with HVWC since 2017. She has a BA from Trinity College in Public Policy and Environmental Studies, a Masters of Public Administration from NYU, and a law degree from St. John's University. She has served as Deputy Communications Director/Press Secretary for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection and Communications Director for the Westchester County Bar Association. She is fluent in Spanish and Greek.
A mother of three children in the local school district, Christina is on the Boards of the Horsemen PTA and Sleepy Hollow Performing Arts Boosters. She is also involved with Sleepy Hollow Football Club, the Foundation for the Public Schools for the Tarrytowns, and Girl Scouts. In her free time, she enjoys running the local trails.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017), which won the prestigious 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011); A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; and three limited edition chapbooks. She also co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK Women / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018). Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, n+1, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is a professor of English in The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing for prose.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Dorianne Laux's sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection,The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry.
Elizabeth Alexander is the co-author of Poems in Conversation & a Conversation with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Slapering Hol Press, 2008). Elizabeth Alexander- poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate- is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education. Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund. Notably, Alexander composed and delivered "Praise Song for the Day" for the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, and is author or co-author of fourteen books. Her book of poems, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006, and her memoir, The Light of the World, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2015.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Estha Weiner's newest poetry collection is This Insubstantial Pageant (Broadstone Books, 2022).
She is also author of at the last minute ( Salmon Poetry) ; In the Weather of the World { Salmon
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Garfield Charles has 20+ years of experience as a high school English teacher and more than six years as an Assistant Dean at Greenwich High School in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Garfield earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Campus, Trinidad, and a Masters of Arts in English from the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He then earned a Masters of Science in School Building Leadership (Educational Supervision and Educational Administration) and completed a Certificate Program in School District Leadership from Mercy College, Purchase, New York. Garfield has successfully defended his dissertation on "The Implementation of Personalized Learning at Merryweather High School" at Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York.
Garfield's teaching career spans teaching high school English at Queen's Royal College, Port of Spain in Trinidad, to Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts, to Greenwich High School in Greenwich Connecticut where he taught high school English for 13 years. Garfield has also served as the Greenwich Public Schools Summer School Coordinator and has coordinated the diversity awareness activities at the high school level for over five years.
Garfield is the recipient of the Susan J. Goldberg Memorial Teacher Award from the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center from Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York. He serves on the Boards of the Hudson Valley Writing Center in TarryTown, New York and the Greenwich Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. In addition to teaching and learning, Garfield is an avid road cyclist, competing in various tours, and he loves the winter sports, especially alpine skiing. One would find him on the northern icy trails with his wife and
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Program Director
- Program Director of HVWC
Jennifer Franklin has been the Program Director of HVWC since 2014. She concentrated in English and Creative Writing at Brown University. She holds an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts.
Jennifer Franklin has been the Program Director of the Hudson Valley Writers Center since 2014. She has published three full-length collections, most recently, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023). With Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, she coedited the anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, March 2024). In 2021, she received both a Cafe Royal Foundation Grant in Literature and a NYFA/City Artist Corps Grant in Poetry. Her work has been published widely in anthologies, print publications, and online including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry Society's "Poetry in Motion," and Prairie Schooner. Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin's poems for The Academy of American Poets "poem-a-day" series in March 2023. Most recently, her poem, "Memento Mori: Apple Orchard" was included in the eco-poetry section of the Beford Introduction to Literature (Macmillian, 2024). She holds an AB from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia University where she was the Harvey Baker Fellow. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. Each spring semester, she also teaches craft workshops in Manhattanville's MFA program. She lives in New York City with her husband, their daughter, and their rescue pit bull, Dottie.
Jennifer Stewart Miller is a poet and former lawyer. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University, and previously practiced law in California. Among other things, she has served as a court appointed special advocate for a child in foster care and as a member of the board of directors of Child Advocates of Silicon Valley.
Job Titles:
- Slapering Hol Press, Copy Editor
Kimiko Hahn is the author of nine books of poetry, including Brain Fever, Toxic Flora, The Narrow Road to the Interior, The Unbearable Heart, which received an American Book Award, and Earshot, which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award. Her other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.
Leela Chantrelle is a poet and literature enthusiast hailing from San Francisco, California. She received a Bachelor's in English and Creative Writing from Cornell University in 2014. Afterwards, she moved to Paris, France for a few years and just recently moved back to the United States. Currently, she teaches English at a progressive high school in Baltimore, Maryland.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Jewish American Writer
- Slapering Hol Press, Managing Editor
Liz Marlow is a Jewish American writer. She is the author of They Become Stars (Slapering Hol Press 2020). Her work has been included in Best Small Fictions and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best New Poets anthologies. Additionally, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Greensboro Review, The Idaho Review, The Minnesota Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor-in-chief of Minyan Magazine and managing editor of Slapering Hol Press. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University.
Liz Marlow's collection, They Become Stars, is a book of real-life horrors revolving around the controversial World War II figure, Chaim Rumkowski, each one exquisitely rendered.The voices of the Holocaust-its victims, its perpetrators-rise wraithlike in these poems, singing clear notes against our collective impulse to turn away. It takes stunning courage to grapple with Rumkowski's twisted legacy and ferocious skill to conjure this book's strange beauty from what is not merely ugly but hideous. With their arresting imagery and relentless precision, Marlow's poems leave us, gasping and floodlit in history's chambers, with nowhere to hide.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English at Cornell University
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Award; Black Swan, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a SHP chapbook collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. She is currently at work on The Coal Tar Colors, her third poetry collection, and Purchase, a collection of essays. She was one of ten celebrated poets commissioned to write poems inspired by Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series in conjunction with the 2015 exhibit One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Visions of the Great Migration North for MoMA. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca, New York arts collective. In 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women's suffrage and the fight for political equality, at the National Theatre London.
Associate Professor of English at Cornell University, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was awarded the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Marilyn Nelson for her first collection of poetry, Black Swan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). Her second, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The SHP editors chose Clief-Stefanon to be the sixth "Conversation" master poet with Leela Chantrelle.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
As a corporate executive, Mary Carroll Linder headed up brand strategy, corporate communications and crisis management departments for several Fortune 100 companies. Mary has been a Board member of the Ordway Theater, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and Twin Cities Public Television. She is a member of the Philipse Manor Improvement Association and the Philips Manor Garden Club. Mary is an active volunteer with Literacy Volunteers of Tarrytown as an ESL tutor, and the Church of the Magdalene in Pocantico Hills as a CCD teacher.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Administrative & Communications Coordinator, Youth Programs Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Nick Makoha was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut, Kingdom of Gravity. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Malika's Kitchen Fellow, and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet, Resurrection Man. His poems appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Review, Rialto, Poetry London, Triquarterly Review, Boston Review, Callaloo, and Wasafiri. His poem ‘Vista' was used as part of a video installation to promote the Turner prize in 2008 for Tate Remix. His poem "Beatitude" is included in Being Human, the third book in the Staying Alive poetry trilogy. In 2005 award winning publisher Flippedeye launched its pamphlet series with his debut, The Lost Collection of an Invisible Man. He is a trustee for the Arvon Foundation and a member of the Malika's Poetry Kitchen collective. Born in Uganda, Nick Makoha fled the country with his mother, as a result of the political overtones that arose from the civil war during the Idi Amin dictatorship. He has lived in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and currently resides in London. He has presented his work at many international events and toured for the British Council in Finland, Czech Republic, the United States, and the Netherlands. Nick Makoha's chapbook, The Second Republic, was published by Slapering Hol Press as part of the first Seven New Generation African Poets Box Set edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Richard has recently returned to the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center as treasurer. He is an Assistant Director of Finance with Aimbridge Hospitality, currently based out of the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Previously, Richard had a long career on Wall Street with a focus on instructional credit research, sales and trading where he held positions with Canaccord Genuity Inc., Pierpont Securities LLC, GPM Securities LLC, and BDS securities LLC. Previous to this Richard was an investment banker with Daiwa Securities' merger and acquisitions group, a Senior Financial Analyst at Kidder, Peabody & Co. and a Senior Accountant with BDO Seidman. He also serves as a board member and treasurer for the Society of the First Families of New York. Richard is a licensed CPA and holds a Bachelor's of Arts degree from Hamilton College and a Masters of Business Administration from Rutgers University. Richard lives in northern Westchester with his wife and two english setters.
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Member of the Literary Advisory Committee
Sean Nevin‘s A House That Falls (2005), won the SHP Chapbook Competition. Nevin teaches writing at Drew University where he directs the MFA Program in Poetry and Translation. In 2008, he published his first full-length collection, Oblivio Gate, awarded by the Crab Orchard Series First Book Prize in Poetry. His honors include a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, the Alsop Review Poetry Prize, the Katherine C. Turner Academy of American Poets University Prize, and two fellowships from the Arizona Commission of the Arts.
Sophia Bannister is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she received a BA in English Writing.
SUSANA H. CASE is an award-winning poet who has authored nine books of poetry, most recently If This Isn't Love, Broadstone Books, 2023. She has won several Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards, an IPPY, a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite award, and she was a Finalist twice and an Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, as well as Finalist for the American Book Fest Awards, and the International Book Awards. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and an English-Ukrainian edition is forthcoming in January, 2024 from Slapering Hol Press. Case co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press, 2022. A former university professor in NYC, Case currently is a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and a co-host of the literary series W-E: Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond. http://www.susanahcase.com/
Job Titles:
- Member of the SHP Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Author of We Come Elemental
Tamiko Beyer is the author of We Come Elemental (Alice James Books), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award and a Lamda Literary Award Finalist, and of the chapbook, bough breaks (Meritage Press). She has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, Astreaea Lesbian Writers Fund, Hedgebrook, and Washington University in St. Louis. She is a social justice communications writer and strategist.
Tara Flint Taylor's Bone Wishing names the shapes of grief: "a dark umbrella shaken / after hard rain," an "iron anchor on the desert floor, the "empty pot on the stove tinged pink." Then, with nothing but the gritty clarity of her eye and voice, Taylor goes about the hard work of «mak[ing] some makeshift / shelter for [the] self.» From the ruins emerges the indelible shelter of this profound and deeply felt collection.
Tara Flint Taylor's work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. Tara is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint.
Job Titles:
- Honorary Senior Research Associate
TJ Dema is Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is also a poet, arts administrator, and teaching artist whose poems have appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Kalahari Review, Cordite Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Mandible (Slapering Hol Press, 2014) was selected for publication by The African Poetry Book Fund as part of the Seven New Generation African Poets boxset. The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Sillerman Prize for African Poetry. Her work has been supported by The Danish Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Centre, and Northwestern University's Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She has been named a Botswana Top 40 under 40 Catalyst, as well as Mail and Guardian Editor's Choice award recipient.
Kenyan poet, scriptwriter, and editor Clifton Gachagua was born and raised in Nairobi and earned his undergraduate degree in biomedical science at Maseno University. His debut poetry collection, The Madman at Kilifi (2014), was chosen for the inaugural Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets by the African Poetry Book Fund. In his foreword to the collection, Kwame Dawes stated, "Gachagua's poems are urgently present; they emerge out of sources like the radio, newspaper, television, as well as street stories and rumors. They seek to chart a changing society and while the effort is largely impossible to accomplish, the gesture is important." Gachagua is a member of the pan-African writing collective, Jalada. He lives in Nairobi.
Tsitsi Jaji is a poet and scholar from Zimbabwe. Associate professor of English at Duke University, she is the author of two books of poetry: Beating the Graves, was published in 2017 in the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press. Carnaval was published by Slapering Hol Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and in journals including Black Renaissance Noire, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, New Coin, and Jalada.