NEPC Board of Directors – New England Poetry Club

Board Members

President: Steven Ratiner
Vice-President: Linda Haviland Conte
Clerk: Doug Holder
Treasurer: Joy Martin
Programming Chair: David P. Miller
Special Advisor: Stephen Honig
Newsletter Editor: Elizabeth Lund
Regie O’Hare Gibson
Jean Dany Joachim

Advisory Board Members

Wendy Drexler
Nidia Hernández
Alexander Levering Kern
Member News Editor: Trapper Markelz
Membership: Gloria Monaghan
Jason O’Toole
Lloyd Schwartz
Vijaya Sundaram
Lynne Viti

Former Board Members

NEPC Historian

Sarah-Jane Burton

President Steven Ratiner

Steven Ratiner, poet, essayist, editor, and educator, is the Poet Laureate Emeritus for Arlington, Mass. His new poetry collection, Grief’s Apostrophe, will be issued by Beltway Editions in 2025. He’s previously published three poetry chapbooks and been included in numerous anthologies. His writing frequently appears in journals in America and abroad, including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, QRLS (Singapore), HaMusach (Israel), and Poetry Australia. He’s also written poetry criticism for The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Giving Their Word – Conversations with Contemporary Poets (University of Massachusetts Press) features interviews with many of contemporary poetry’s most acclaimed figures. His Laureate project–the weekly Red Letter Poems–is now in its fifth year and presents a diverse range of poets, from up-and-coming talents to some of the most important voices from America and abroad. (steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com).

Vice-President Linda Haviland Conte

Linda Haviland Conte is the author of the full-length collection Seldom Purely and the chapbook Slow as a Poem (Ibbetson Street Press). Her work has appeared in the anthologies From the Farther Shore, Constellations, Bagels with the Bards, and Connecticut River Review. Linda has been featured in Verse Daily and WCAI’s Poetry Sunday. Her poems have received recognition from the state and the national poetry societies.

Website: https://lindaconte.net

Advisory Board Member Wendy Drexler

Wendy Drexler, photograph by Debi Milligan

Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains, will be published in January 2026 by Lily Poetry Review and received honorable mention for the Paul Nemser Prize. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Solstice, The Mid-American Review, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018 to 2023, and served as programming co-chair for the NEPC from 2016–2024.

Board Member Regie Gibson

Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba, and Europe. In Italy, representing the U.S., Regie received both the Absolute Poetry Award (Monfalcone) and the Europa en Versi Award (LaGuardia di Como). He’s also received the Walker Scholarship for poetry from the Provincetown Arts Work Center, a Mass Cultural Council Award, a YMCA Writer’s Fellowship, the Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation, and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) Grants for the production of his first musical “The Juke: A Blues Bacchae” in which he uses Euripides’ tragedy to explore African American music and spirituality. Regie currently serves as the lead creative on a team of scientists and members of the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Center (Hague, Netherlands), helping craft language on climate change. He currently serves on the boards of the New England Poetry Club and Grub Street Creative Writing Center. He teaches at Clark University and is the proud father of a newly minted Eagle Scout.

Board Member Nidia Hernández

Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project, lamajadesnuda.com, won the 2011 World Summit Awards, and her radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) has presented works from the last 35 years, with more than 1,820 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Spain. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press), is a co-editor of Mercurius Magazine, a UK publication based in Barcelona, Spain, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light by Rafael Cadenas. In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award. The Farewell Light 2024 is her most recent collection of poems published by Arrowsmith Press.

Clerk Doug Holder

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. He is the arts editor of The Somerville Times and the curator of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series. Holder teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College. His own work has been published in the Worcester Review, Lilipoh, Rattle, The Boston Globe, The Cafe Review, and elsewhere. For over thirty years, Holder ran poetry groups at McLean Hospital for psychiatric patients. Holder has received a citation from the Massachusetts House of Representatives for his work as a poet, editor, publisher, and professor. The “Doug Holder Papers Collection” is archived at the University at Buffalo libraries. Many of his interviews with poets and writers are in collections at Harvard University and U/Mass Boston. Holder is also the co-founder of the literary group “The Bagel Bards.” Holder’s latest collection of poetry is “The Essential Doug Holder…” (Big Table Books).

Special Advisor Stephen Honig

Stephen is a corporate attorney in Boston who has been writing poetry and prose for his whole life. He has published five books in the last three years: a poetry collection of earlier works entitled “Messing Around With Words;” chapbooks relating to people who ride the rails (“Rail Head”) and concerning the first ten months of the pandemic (“Mandatory COVID Chapbook”); a collection of recent poetry exploring the American experience (“Laertes in America”); and a collection of short stories about obsession and how innocent people get caught into unexpected chaos entitled “Noir Ain’t the Half of It.” He has also written a business column in a newspaper for two decades and regularly posts on business matters at The Law and Other Anomalies. Ibbetson Street magazine has, on occasion, honored him with inclusion of some of his work, for which he is grateful. The law practice includes financing and buying and selling technology companies, and advising management and boards of directors on their obligations and procedures. Serving on the board at NEPC, he hopes to contribute to the continued good management of the Club.

A resident of Newton, his family consists of three grown children, including two lawyers, and one artist (who integrates poetry into his shows), two grandchildren, and a son now in his freshman year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, all of whom obey Popcorn the dog, who is in charge of everything except the content of poetry.

His interests include serving on nonprofit boards (Big Brothers-Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts; National Association of Corporate Directors–New England), writing poetry regularly, and seeking a publisher for the novels he has written, which for now reside in the bowels of his computer. He also awaits the promised reopening of Cantab Lounge, as he enjoys reading and hearing poetry in beer-soaked basements.

Board Member Jean Dany Joachim

Jean Dany Joachim, Cambridge Poet Populist from 2009 to 2011, and the current Poet in Residence at First Church in Cambridge, is also an author of short stories and plays. He created the Many Voices Project, a series of readings and follow-up poetry workshops that inspired conversations about race and equality. He has four published collections of poetry: Chen Plenn (2007), Crossroads / Chimenkwaze (2013), Avec des Mots (2014), and Quartier (2016). He is the director of City Night Readings, a series featuring diverse poetic talents, writers, and artists. He is an adjunct professor at Bunker Hill Community College. Jean Dany is a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council grant recipient for his play: Your Voice Poet, and the winner of STC’s Playwrights of Color competition.

Advisory Board Member / Member News Editor Trapper Markelz

Trapper Markelz (he/him) is the author of the chapbooks Childproof Sky (Cherry Dress Chapbooks, 2023) and Off to War, Daughter (Rockwood Press, 2026). His work has appeared in the journals Baltimore Review, Passengers Journal, Pine Row Press, Wild Roof Journal, Greensboro Review, and Poetry Online, among others. Trapper grew up in Homer, Alaska, attended RIT and Harvard, lived in Chicago for 10 years, and now resides in Arlington, MA, with his wife, Maureen, and four children, Hannah, Lucy, Jack, and Alice. Learn more at trappermarkelz.com

Treasurer Joy Martin

Southern-born, Joy currently resides in New England’s Boston area, surrounded by the comforts and discomforts of white privilege. She enjoys membership in the New England Poetry Club and the Poetry Society of Virginia. In addition to sharing poetry with Gloria Mindock, she participates in Newton Poetry and Poetry Reimagined groups. Published in Muddy River Poetry Review, Radical Teacher Journal, Ibbetson Street Press, among others, her poems explore life with its multitudinous facets, including her and broader humanity’s place and challenges within it. She hopes that poets and their poetry will do the work of energizing people and steering humanity toward greater understanding and goodness. She looks forward to sharing her Project Management, Business Analysis, and technical skills, along with her love of poetry, with others to further the reach of the New England Poetry Club.

Programming Chair David P. Miller

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His chapbook, The Afterimages, was published by Červená Barva Press in 2014. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Poetry Porch, Denver Quarterly, Muddy River Poetry Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Boston Literary Magazine, Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry, Lily Poetry Review, Nixes Mate Review, Ibbetson Street, Poem of the Moment, and What Rough Beast, among others. He is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets. His poem “Add One Father to Earth” was awarded an Honorable Mention by Robert Pinsky for the NEPC’s 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Prize competition. With a background in experimental theater before turning to poetry, David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years. He was a librarian at Curry College in Massachusetts, from which he retired in June 2018.

Here is an interview from December 2018, conducted by Doug Holder for his program “Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer.”

Advisory Board Member / Membership Secretary Gloria Monaghan

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University. She has published seven collections of poetry: Diary of Saint Marion, Lily Poetry Review, (2025), Cormorant on the Strand, Lily Poetry Review (2023), Hydrangea, Kelsay Press,(2020), Torero, Nixes Mate, (2020) False Spring, Adelaide Books, (2019), The Garden, Flutter Press (2015), and Flawed, Finishing Line Press (2011). Her poems have appeared in Mom Egg Review, Quartet and River Heron among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize. She has been nominated for the Griffin Prize, and for the Sheila Margaret Motton Award. She was a Semi-Finalist for the Tenth Gate Prize. She is also a filmmaker.

Advisory Board Member Jason O’Toole

Jason O’Toole is a former Poet Laureate of North Andover, MA, author of three poetry collections and four chapbooks. His newest collection, The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted, has been published by Dead Man’s Press Ink (2025). He was co-founder of The Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest and has served as a judge for other contests in MA and NY, including the Capital Region Poetry Slam and Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize. His work has been published internationally in magazines and anthologies, including Love is for All of Us (Storey Publishing) and The Rhysling Anthology. He serves as treasurer of The Independent Living Resource Center, San Francisco, and works in elder advocacy in Massachusetts. He earned his BA at the New School for Social Research and an MBA from St. Joseph’s College of Maine.

Advisory Board Member Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the current Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts. He’s the author of five books of poetry—These People (Wesleyan Poetry Series), Goodnight, Gracie, Cairo Traffic, Little Kisses, and Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (all with the University of Chicago Press). His poems have been chosen for The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry, and have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, The New Republic, Paris Review, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Consequence, Plume, and numerous other literary journals. He was the Poetry Editor of the Phoenix Literary Section, a guest editor of Ploughshares, and for 18 years, a member of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

For his poetry, he has been awarded NEPC’s Daniel Varoujan Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. His book Little Kisses was named a Massachusetts Book Award “Must Read” poetry book of 2017. In 1995, he was named by the Associates of the Boston Public Library one of Boston’s “Literary Lights,” and in 2017, Mass Poetry invited him to read in an evening of Boston’s “inspired leaders.”

Lloyd has a long-standing relationship with theater and music. His adaptation of his first book, These People: Voices for the Stage, was produced by the Poets’ Theatre. As an actor, he has appeared on stage with such theatrical luminaries as Stockard Channing, Tommy Lee Jones, James Woods, Alvin Epstein, and Cherry Jones. His poems have been set to music by such distinguished composers as John Harbison, Scott Wheeler, Mohammed Fairouz, Helen Grime, David Patterson, and Jean Singer. Soprano Renée Fleming invited him to speak to her vocal master class on “The Poet’s Perspective.”

A close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, who became the subject of his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard, Lloyd has become an internationally recognized editor and scholar of her work. His Bishop volumes include the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, FSG’s Centennial Edition of her Prose, and Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, the very first collection of writings about her work, chosen by Donald Hall to inaugurate his University of Michigan Press series Under Discussion.

Lloyd is also a widely respected arts critic. His book Music In—and On—the Air (Arrowsmith) is a selection of the classical music reviews he first broadcast on NPR’s Fresh Air. He’s also the Contributing Arts Critic for WBUR’s web-journal, the ARTery. As the longtime Classical Music Editor of the Boston Phoenix, he was awarded three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Lloyd Schwartz reads his work, “A True Poem”:

Advisory Board Member Vijaya Sundaram

Vijaya Sundaram (she, her, hers) was the second Poet Laureate (2023-2025) for the City of Medford, Massachusetts. Her first collection of poems, Fractured Lens, was published in 2023 by Červená Barva Press. Originally from India, she is now based in Medford, MA. Aside from poems, she has written short stories, plays, and a short (unpublished) novel. She is also a musician and singer-songwriter, amateur digital artist, and educator. Her poetry and short pieces have appeared in publications like The Rising Phoenix Press, the Stardust Review, and TELL Magazine, among others. She has read her poems at poetry events in and around Boston. Currently, she runs an Open Mic for Poetry and Original Song at the Arts Collaborative Medford, as well as a Medford Poetry Club at the Medford Public Library.

Advisory Board Member Lynne Viti

photo by Richard Howard

Lynne Viti is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Westwood, Massachusetts, and a lecturer emerita in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. The author of four poetry collections, including her most recent book, The Walk to Cefalù (Cornerstone Press, 2022), she facilitates a poets in the schools program and a biweekly poetry workshop at her local library. https://lynneviti.wordpress.com/