Gwenn A. Nusbaum Scholarship

Alicia Mountain is the author of Four in Hand (BOA 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Mountain received her PhD at the University of Denver. She serves on the board of Foglifter, a LGBTQIA+ journal based in the Bay Area. Mountain lives in New York City, where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn and a psychoanalytic candidate at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies.

Declan Ryan was born in Mayo, Ireland and lives in London. His debut collection, Crisis Actor, was published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US. His essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry. 

Robert Savino (born April 24, 1948, Jamaica, NY) is a native Long Island poet, Suffolk County Poet Laureate 2015–2017, Board Member at the Walt Whitman Birthplace and at the Long Island Poetry & Literature Repository Center. He is the winner of the 2008 Oberon Poetry Prize, Association of Italian American Educators – Cristoforo Colombo Award for Literary Leadership (2019), and Town of Islip Italian American Heritage Award for Visual & Performing Arts – in Literature (2019). Robert was first inspired by Blake and Whitman in the sixties when everything became not as ordinary as it appeared and he began a life sentence in a metaphoric mind.

His poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, and online, including The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Long Island Quarterly, Mobius, Negative Capability, The North American Review and Sport Literate; and his poems have been written for art and music. One of the poems, “October’s Opal,” was composed by Yung Shen Hsaio as a four-instrument musical ensemble piece and presented at the 2017 International Rostrum of Composers and Conservatorio Vincenzo Bellini, Palermo, Italy.

Robert is co-editor of two bilingual collections of Italian Americans Poets, No Distance Between Us – Italian American Poets of Long Island and No Distance Between Us – The Next Collection – Italian American Poets of New York State. His books include Fireballs of an Illuminated Scarecrow, Inside a Turtle Shell and I’m Not the Only One Here. No Distance Between Us (Nessuna Distanza Tra Noi) is scheduled to become a trilogy of Italian American poetry in a cultural tribute to Dante Aligheri. Inside a Turtle Shell, a diverse journey of paths crossed, lost and found, was selected as the second collection in the three-volume Turtle Island Series (Allbook Books).

Robert lives in West Islip, NY, with his wife and enjoys the role of poetry mentor.

Gwenn Nusbaum is honored to help create the Gwenn A. Nusbaum Scholarship on behalf of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, with a mission to support—in the words and humanistic sensibility of Whitman—”poets to come.” She is grateful for support from the Board of Trustees, acknowledging Jack Coulehan and Jeffrey Gould for their financial contributions to this program. Gwenn also appreciates the talented scholarship applicants and is pleased that as of 2025, we will also recognize an Honorary Mention recipient as well as our Scholarship Award winner.

Gwenn “always resonated with the indelible power of poetry with its unique economy of language and capacity to heal both writer and reader.” A poet and writer herself since high school, Gwenn received a Pushcart Nomination, Honorary Mention, and a Gradiva Nomination. Her poems have appeared in several print and on-line poetry journals. Her chapbook, “Normal War”, is currently archived at Poets House in New York City.

Published also in the field of psychoanalytic and group therapy for women with histories of childhood sexual traumas, Gwenn maintained a private psychotherapy as well as teaching practice in the East Village of Manhattan for 40 years, retiring at the end of 2022.  

Having worked with creatives throughout much of her career, Gwenn pivoted to the coaching component of her private practice, specializing in work with creators of all genres as well as clients committed to personal growth. She is accredited as a Senior Coach and Mentor from the International Authority for Professional Coaching & Mentoring and is a licensed clinical social worker with a Master’s in Social Work from New York University.