Publication Celebration for four HVWC Poetry Students: Vincent Bell, Helene Fisher, Tony Howarth, and Rachel Kowalsky (In Person & via Zoom)

Join Sophia Bannister (at HVWC) and Jennifer Franklin (on Zoom) as they celebrate the publications of four long-time students of the Hudson Valley Writers Center.

We are happy to hold this event in person in accordance with the current state and CDC health guidelines. We will be asking attendees to attend in a mask and show proof of vaccination. (Proof of vaccination includes Excelsior Pass or a photo / hard copy of the completed vaccination card.) Please visit our Covid-19 policies page for complete details. We are pleased to report that HVWC will have a retrofitted HVAC system at the time of this reading.

Unable to attend in person? Join our live stream via Zoom. Please register below. You will be sent the Zoom link immediately via email (please check spam filters) or email admin@writerscenter.org with any questions.

Vincent Bell grew up in a NYC family of non-writers but he has been writing poetry for over 50 years. He had always wanted to be a full-time writer, but ended up as a businessman after graduate school. Now he is spending most of his time writing and taking photographs. He lives with his wife in Ardsley, NY and they have two grown children and two young grandsons.

H. E. Fisher’s lyrical and experimental poetry, prose poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in At Length, Unbroken Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Longleaf Review, Indianapolis Review, Miracle Monocle, SWWIM, Pithead Chapel, Feral, and The Rumpus, among other publications and anthologies. Her lyrical essay, “Ocean: An Autobiography” (Hopper Magazine) and prose poem “Elegy for Trees” (Feral) were each nominated for the Best of the Net. H.E. is the editor of (Re) An Ideas Journal. H.E. studies at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at City College of New York, where she received the 2019 Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson. H.E. has also been a finalist in the 2020-21 Comstock Review Chapbook Contest and a semi-finalist in the Grayson Books Chapbook Contest. Her first collection of poetry, Sterile Field, will be published in 2022. She has also completed a chapbook. H.E. lives in the Hudson River Valley.

Tony Howarth, editor for dramatic writing of The Westchester Review, is a playwright, director, and former journalist. He retired in 1991 after twenty-eight years as a high school and college teacher of English and theatre. William Wordsworth helped him survive adolescence, inspired him to write poetry of his own, but as as a college freshman he found a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused did not fit well in a climate devoted to the work of Eliot and Pope. He adjusted his ambitions to journalism, in Cleveland, Meriden CT, the US. Army, Lancaster PA, Indianapolis, and New York City where he was editor of the editorial page of The World-Telegram and Sun. Disillusioned after a printers’ strike and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he turned to teaching, where he was asked to develop a theatre program, which in turn led to a list of professional credits, including a dozen plays and a musical presented off-Broadway; full lengths include Thornwood, which won a Drama League grant, produced at Circle Rep and the Mint Theatre in New York City, colleges across the U.S., Amsterdam, Tanzania, made into an award-winning indie film, Slings and Arrows. For many summers he directed musicals at the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth MA. He began writing poetry again in 2009 after a visit to Wordworth’s Dove Cottage (clouds and daffodils) in England’s Lake District. His poetry, developed at the Hudson Valley Writers Center under the treasured guidance of Jennifer Franklin and Fred Marchant, has appeared in many magazines, among them Chronogram, The Naugatuck River Review, a magazine in England Obsessed with Pipework, The Connecticut River Review, Raven’s Perch, The Sow’s Ear, and the Grayson Press anthology Forgotten Women. And a play published by The Westchester Review called The Wedding Ring, a moment in the life of William Wordsworth.