PATTI TANA NAMED WWBA’S LONG ISLAND POET OF THE YEAR

The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association is pleased to announce the selection of Patti Tana as our 2009 Long Island Poet of the Year. This award honors poets who are native to or live on Long Island, have published poetry of excellent quality, and have worked to foster the growth and appreciation of poetry in local communities. On October 18, Patti gave a poetry reading titled “The Intimate Voice,” and we added her name to a distinguished list of authors as the recipient of the 2009 Long Island School of Poetry Award.  

A native of Peekskill, New York, Patti has lived on Long Island since 1968. She has taught at C. W. Post College, and since 1971 she has been a Professor of English at Nassau Community College where she was the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Project from 1998-2002. Nassau Community College conferred on her The Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award for her seven books of poetry:             

How Odd This Ritual of Harmony  (Gusto Press, 1981)

Ask the Dreamer Where Night Begins: Poems & Postscripts    (Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1986)

The River (Birnham Wood Graphics, 1990)

Wetlands (Papier-Mache Press, 1993)

When the Light Falls Short of the Dream (Eighth Moon Press, 1998)

Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings (Whittier Publications, Inc., 2003)

This Is Why You Flew Ten Thousand Miles (Whittier Publications, Inc., 2006)

Her poem "A Caravan of Coffins" won the 2009 Nassau Review Poetry Award. The Review nominated "Skin Knows Skin" and "Buy or Lease?" for a Pushcart Prize, and Patti recorded them on poetryvlog.com. Other poems have won awards from the Long Island Poetry Collective, The Shelley Society of New York, Xanadu: A Literary Journal, and the Volcano Arts Center in Hawaii where she was Artist-in-Residence.   Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings was considered for a Pulitzer Prize.

Patti has been Associate Editor of the Long Island Quarterly since it was founded in 1990, and she has also served on the editorial board of the Hiram Poetry Review and Esprit: A Humanities Magazine. She assisted Maxwell C. Wheat, Jr., in editing Raining Leaves (Great South Bay Poetry Co-op, 1986), an anthology of Long Island poets. Recently Patti edited Songs of Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul, Inc., 2007), an anthology of sixty-three poets, almost all from Long Island.

She has performed her poems at Cedarmere, the Heckscher Museum of Art, the Nassau County Museum of Art, and at various libraries, schools, Ys, and senior centers. She has also conducted poetry workshops at Long Island senior centers and libraries, as well as several at Dowling College for the Live Poets Society.

Several past Whitman Birthplace Poets-in-Residence have commented favorably on Patti Tana’s work. The late William Stafford said of her 1993 volume Wetlands, “How directly and satisfyingly these poems connect with life! They form a series of pictures that converge in an over-arching myth.  I’ll pack this book along with me and cherish it.” X. J. Kennedy added, “In Wetlands, sensitive stories and poems form a collection that’s beautifully united: seamless in style, with themes drawn from a world in which oceans and streams and amniotic fluid are all one. An ample display of fresh and exciting talent.”

William Heyen’s response to her 2003 Make Your Way Across This Bridge: New & Selected Writings was equally enthusiastic: “Listen to this mature poet make something of the nothing always threatening to silence us. The sense of loveliness is always in conflict with a darker knowledge. Strong poems to my ear. The clear and moving poems here combine for a fine, welcome, wide-ranging, memorable, healing book.”

Patti is currently writing poems for Any Given Day, a book of poems that will be published by Whittier Publications, Inc., a Long Island publisher.