We are pleased to announce the formation of the Poetry by the Sea Advisory Committee and honored that three extraordinary members of our community—Patricia Behrens, Allison Joseph, and Clare Rossini—have agreed to participate in the committee.
We have also added a new volunteer position of Social Media Coordinator to help us increase the visibility of the Conference in the run up to it and during the Conference itself, and are pleased to announce that one of last year’s Work Study Scholars, Laura Salvatore, has agreed to take it on.
The mandate of the Advisory Committee is to help us broaden and enrich the reach of the Conference in terms of faculty and attendees while continuing to serve our core group of participants.
After two successful Poetry by the Sea Conferences—in 2022 and 2023—we began to think about how we could further realize PBTS founder Kim Bridgford’s vision of the Conference as a diverse and inclusive community of poets. We reached out to community members whose expertise, energy, and dedication to the Conference would, we thought, move us toward this goal. We’re delighted, and humbled, to report that all three responded with enthusiasm. Here are the Advisory Committee members:
Patricia Behrens – Fundraising Liaison
Patricia Behrens began publishing poetry in 2010 and her poetry has since appeared in publications such as Naugatuck River Review, Split Rock Review, The Literary Bohemian, The Road Not Taken, Think, and American Arts Quarterly. She has also practiced law under the name Patricia McGovern, served as a Board member of non-profit legal organizations, and co-edited Courthouses of the Second Circuit: Their Architecture, History, and Stories (Acanthus Press, 2015).
Allison Joseph – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Liaison
Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is on the faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021, PBTS Best Book Award winner), Any Proper Weave (Kelsay Books, 2022), Speak and Spell (Glass Lyre Press, 2022), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018). Confessions of a Barefaced Woman won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. She was named Illinois Author of the Year for 2022 by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of beloved poet and editor Jon Tribble.
Clare Rossini – Outreach Liaison
Clare Rossini’s third collection, Lingo, was published by University of Akron Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and the Best American Poetry series. The Poetry of Capital, an anthology Rossini co-edited, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2021. Her poems have been featured on Connecticut Public Radio and the BBC. She has received fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Maxwell Shepherd Foundation, and the Bush Foundation, and has had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Vermont Studio Center. Rossini taught for many years in the Vermont College low-residency MFA Program. She currently serves as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at Trinity College in Hartford, teaching creative writing courses and directing an arts outreach program which places college students in a core-city public-school art classroom.
Laura Salvatore – Social Media Coordinator
Laura Salvatore is a poet living in Queens, New York. She received her MFA at The City College of New York. In 2022, Laura was a fellow for the Zip Code Memory Project, which sought to find community-based ways to memorialize the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus. She participated in the micro-residency Poets Afloat in April 2022 and was a work study scholar for the Poetry By the Sea conference in May 2023. Her poetry can be found in Movable Type, Pith Journal, Angel City Review, and The Marbled Sigh, amongst others.
We look forward with great excitement to working with this stellar Advisory Committee as we prepare for the 2024 Conference, on May 21-24.
Anna Evans, Nicole Caruso Garcia, Linda Stern
Board of Directors
Poetry by the Sea, Inc.