Join us for an evening of poetry and music as we honor the winners of the 2015 String Poet Prize, and the fifth anniversary of String Poet!
Featuring a reading by 2015 Finalist Judge Bruce Guernsey and culminating in the reading of prize-winner John Beaton’s poem followed by the premiere performance of Joelle Wallach’s composition, this is a must-see event for anyone able to attend!
In honor of reaching the 5 year mark, these excellent poets from past issues will read their String Poet pearls: Daniel Brown, Gladys Henderson, Robert Schechter, Pramila Venkateswaran, Herb Wahlsteen and Muriel Harris Weinstein.
John Beaton is a retired actuary who was raised in the Highlands of Scotland and lives on Vancouver Island, Canada. He was moderator of The Deep End workshop at Eratosphere for several years. His poetry has appeared widely online and in publications as diverse as Able Muse and Gray’s Sporting Journal. He is a regular spoken word performer, both solo and with the band Celtic Chaos.
Bruce Guernsey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught creative writing and American Literature for twenty-five years. He has also taught at William and Mary, Johns Hopkins, the University of New Hampshire, and Virginia Wesleyan College where he was the poet in residence for four years. A graduate with honors from Colgate University, he holds M.A.’s from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins and a PhD from New Hampshire, writing his dissertation on tools as metaphor in Robert Frost’s poetry.
Joelle Wallach writes music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo voices and choruses. Her String Quartet 1995 was the American Composers Alliance nominee for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The New York Philharmonic Ensembles premiered her octet, From the Forest of Chimneys, written to celebrate their 10th anniversary; and the New York Choral Society commissioned her secular oratorio, Toward a Time of Renewal, for 200 voices and orchestra to commemorate their 35th Anniversary Season in Carnegie Hall.
Daniel Brown’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, PN Review, Parnassus, The New Criterion and other journals, as well as a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (ed. Billy Collins) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (ed. David Yezzi). His work has been awarded a Pushcart prize, and his collection Taking the Occasion won the New Criterion Poetry Prize. His new collection is What More?
Gladys Henderson has received many prizes for her poetry, and she is widely published. In 2015 she was selected featured poet in Oberon. Her chapbook, Eclipse Of Heaven, was published by Finishing Line Press, (June 2008).
Robert Schechter has published poems and translations in Highlights for Children, First Things, The Washington Post, The Evansville Review, Poetry East, The Alabama Literary Review, The Raintown Review, Per Contra, Light Quarterly, LightenUp Online, Snakeskin, and Bumbershoot, among other journals.
Pramila Venkateswaran is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002), Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), and Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009). An award-winning poet, she has performed her poems internationally, most recently in the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Socialism and Democracy. She is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College. She plays the violin and sings Indian classical music.
Herb Wahlsteen earned a B.A. in English from CA St. U., Fullerton, and an M.A. in English from Columbia U. He earned a permanent NY State license to teach English, grades 7-12, and taught in the NYC Public School System. He was a finalist in the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest, placed 3rd in the Writer’s Digest 77th Annual Writing Competition: Rhyming Category, and has had poems published in: Long Island Quarterly, the Great South Bay magazine, The Lyric magazine, Paumanok Interwoven, and Suffolk County Poetry Review.
Muriel Harris Weinstein’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines: The Comstock Review, The Cortland Review, Kent State Review, The Cape Rock, Nassau Review, and in several anthologies. Poetry is her first love, but she also writes children’s literature, including her first, When Louis Armstrong Taught Me Scat, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and Play Louis, Play!, a middle-grade bio of the great Louis Armstrong, also a Junior Library Guild Selection, winner of the Paterson Prize at P.C.C.C., and nominated for the Texas Bluebonnet Award.
Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Able Muse, 14 Magazine, The Raintown Review, Measure, Alabama Literary Review, Light, and The Evansville Review. His poem “Fieldstone” was selected as the winner of the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize, and his poem “La Gioconda” was chosen as a top sonnet in the 2013 Great River Shakespeare Festival.
Final Judge: George Held is a widely published fiction writer, satirist, translator, book reviewer, and a poet who has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. He was a three-year Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia and has served on the board of The South Fork Natural History Society since 1991. His fifteenth book is After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets (Červená Barva Press, 2011). His most recently published book is Neighbors: The Yard Critters Too (
Composer: 
Internationally acclaimed Violinist 
This event was funded in part by Poets and Writers, Inc. with public funds from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Daniel Brown is a product of Long Island, growing up in Westbury and attending W. Tresper Clark High School there. He studied music as both an undergraduate and a graduate student at Cornell University, and taught music history and theory at Cornell and Dartmouth College. His graduate work at Cornell involved a computerized analysis of music, and this eventually led to a change of field from music to information technology. Daniel obtained a position at IBM, and has pursued a career in a variety of positions including technician, salesperson, and manager. In parallel with this career, Daniel has been writing and publishing. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Partisan Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, The New Criterion and other journals. They have also won a Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180 (/edited by Billy Collins), Fathers (edited by David Ray), and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (edited by David Yezzi). Daniel’s collection Taking the Occasion was awarded the New Critieron Poetry Prize. His Why Bach?, an online appreciation of Bach’s music, is available on the Internet. Daniel currently lives in Baldwin, NY.
Ned Balbo received the 2010 Donald Justice Prize, selected by A.E. Stallings, for The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press/WCU Poetry Center). His previous books include Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize and ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal) and Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize). He has received three Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. New poems are out or forthcoming in The Common, Iowa Review, River Styx, Sou’Wester, Avatar Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore with poet-essayist Jane Satterfield and her daughter Catherine.
Jane Satterfield is the author of Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter, 2009) and two poetry collections: Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Book Award) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Towson University Prize). Among her awards are an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry and the Faulkner Society Gold Medal in the Essay as well as residencies in poetry or nonfiction from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A new manuscript, Her Familiars, was a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series, and her poem, “The War Years,” was selected by Jo Shapcott as winner of the 2011 Mslexia Poetry Competition. Satterfield’s craft essay, “Lucifer Matches,” appears in Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
Hosted by Annabelle Moseley, the event featured a concert by Composer and Featured Musician Barry Tognolini, a reading by 2012 Finalist Judge Kim Bridgford, and a reading of the Honorable Mention and Runner-Up poems, including Muriel Harris Weinstein and Maxine Silverman. Claire Nicolas White spoke about her late husband, Robert White, and his art, which is featured in the String Poet journal. Claire also read two poems, which can be found in this issue.
Annabelle Moseley is the author of one full-length collection and six chapbooks of poetry, a young adult novel, and a collection of children’s poetry. Her full-length collection: The Clock of the Long Now, was published in January 2012 by David Robert Books. Her most recent chapbooks are A Field Guide to the Muses (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and The Divine Tour (forthcoming 2012, Finishing Line Press). The first Walt Whitman Birthplace Writer-in-Residence, 2009-2010, Moseley is also founder and editor of String Poet, an online literary journal of poetry and the arts, and the host of The New York Times-featured String Poet Studio Series and founder of the national String Poet Prize. She is also a Lecturer at St. Joseph’s College. Moseley has published hundreds of poems internationally in such journals as The Texas Review, The Seventh Quarry (Wales), Marsh Hawk Review, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. Her first three chapbooks of poetry, published from 2005 to 2008 include: The Moon is a Lemon (Birnham Wood), Artifacts of Sound (Street Press), and Still Life (Street Press). Annabelle Moseley’s fourth chapbook is First and Last Things, a shared collection with the Welsh poet J. C. Evans, published jointly in New York and Wales by Cross-Cultural Communications. Moseley won first place in the 2008 Writer’s Digest Poetry Contest and a 2008 Amy Award from Poets & Writers.
Mr. Schaff is a free-lance violinist in the greater New York area and performs regularly as a tenured member with many of the leading symphony, opera, and ballet ensembles in the region, in addition to frequent chamber and recital collaborations. In recent seasons he has appeared with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra on their North American tour, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony, Long Island Philharmonic, Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Glimmerglass Opera Festival, and on Broadway in “The Producers” and “Wicked”, and in Paul Shaffer’s orchestra on “The Late Show” with David Letterman. He is the concertmaster of the SONOS Chamber Orchestra in New York City. His second CD of vocal chamber music with tenor Martin Dillon was released in 2004 on Ganymede Records, and he is currently working on a recording project which juxtaposes contemporary music for solo violin with Bach’s B minor Partita, as well as recent live performances with pianists Richard Alston and Thomas Carlo Bo, which explore unjustly neglected works of the grand Romantic tradition of the 19th century. He is the founder and Artistic Director of the Englewood Chamber Players, a non-profit organization which brings together some of the finest musicians in the New York area who perform music of the highest caliber for the communities in which they live, as well as traveling to those unable to attend traditional concerts.
Linda Opyr is the Nassau County Poet Laureate (2011-2013). She is the author of six collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, including The Hudson Review, The Atlanta Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The New York Times. Dr. Opyr holds a Doctor of Arts degree in English and American Literature from St. John’s University. She is an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College and chairs the English Department at Sewanhaka High School.
Nassau County Poet Laureate for 2009-2011, Gayl Teller received an MA from Columbia University and another MA from Queens College, CUNY. Her poetry collections are At the Intersection of Everything You Have Ever Loved, Shorehaven, Moving Day, One Small Kindness, and most recently, Inside the Embrace, which was selected in national competition and published by WordTech/Cherry Grove in 2010. She is the editor of Toward Forgiveness, an anthology of poems (Writers Ink Press, 2011).
Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr. was the first Poet Laureate of Nassau County (2007-2009). In 1980 he received the first Herman Melville Annual Award from the New York State Marine Education Assocation, whose journal, Ripples, he edited for many years. Author of several poetry chapbooks, he is known for his support of the Paumanok Poets, and tireless encouragement of young writers. For years he conducted an October salt marsh (when the marsh’s Spartina grasses turn golden) round-robin participatory poetry reading program at Cedarmere, Roslyn Harbor, home of the 19th Century poet William Cullen Bryant, where Maxwell volunteered in programming.
Janet Packer has established a unique career as a concert violinist and educator. Her performances demonstrate a mastery of a wide range of musical styles. As soloist with orchestra, recitalist, and recording artist, Ms. Packer’s musical intelligence and personality have won the accolades of audiences, critics, and musical colleagues. Janet Packer’s major orchestral appearances include performances with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, National Symphony of Panama, Rochester Philharmonic, and Boston Pops Orchestra. She was chair of the Conservatory string department of the Longy School of Music, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for twelve years. She gives frequent master classes at universities, music schools, and string seminars.
Geoffrey Burleson is Director of Piano Studies at Hunter College. Mr. Burleson has performed to wide acclaim throughout Europe and North America, and is equally active as a recitalist, concerto soloist, chamber musician and jazz performer. The New York Times has hailed his solo performances as “vibrant and compelling”, furthermore praising his “rhythmic brio, projection of rhapsodic qualities, appropriate sense of spontaneity, and rich colorings.” A graduate of the Peabody Conservatory, New England Conservatory, and Stony Brook University (D.M.A.), his principal teachers include Gilbert Kalish, Leonard Shure, Veronica Jochum, Lillian Freundlich, Tinka Knopf, and Audrey Bart Brown.