Last month, I sailed down the East River and across New York Harbor to attend the New York City Poetry Festival, which is held annually on Governor’s Island. This journey required two ferries. On the second ferry, I met Phylisha Villaneuva, an MFA candidate in poetry at St. Francis College, and the poet laureate of Westchester County. I asked her how she had obtained the position of poet laureate of Westchester County, and what the job entailed. The answers, in order, were: she applied, and the usual – a tenured appointment, a small stipend, the performance of readings, the teaching of workshops and a commitment to the enthusiastic promotion of poetry in the community whenever an opportunity arose.

I had no doubt Phylisha would fulfill these obligations. She could not contain her excitement about her upcoming reading at the festival, her MFA program, and the beauty of the very hot day, an enthusiasm which did not diminish even when we discovered that we had taken the wrong ferry to the island. Apparently, there are two ferries to Governor’s Island and the one we took, which leaves from Pier 11, what you might call the Grand Central Station of the ferry system, left us at the spot on the island that was possibly the further possible point from where the festival was taking place, which was near the other ferry, the one that leaves from the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

I was there to help man the table for Poets of Queens while they performed in their allotted time slot, but since I took the wrong ferry and wasted time roaming the island, lost, I arrived to an empty table. While poets from three competing stages orated in the distance, I unpacked the t-shirts (which you can find here) and the group’s most recent anthology (which you can find here).

I am not a poet of Queens. I am studying poetry and I live in Queens. But Poets of Queens, which is run by Olena Jennings, is a group that helped me make the transition from novelist of historical fiction about WWII Bermuda to flaneuse chronicling pandemic-era Astoria. I’ve attended several of Poets of Queens’s readings at QED Astoria. (During the pandemic, I had to go local, and when I went local, I went deep.)

At one of the readings this year, I heard poetry read by Maria Lisella, the poet laureate of Queens.

Didn’t know that Queens has a poet laureate? It does. So does the Bronx (Haydil Henriquez), Brooklyn (Tina Chang), and Staten Island (Marguerite Maria Rivas). I couldn’t find a poet laureate for Manhattan, although New York State has one in Patricia Spears Jones.

What I learned today is that Maria Lisella would like to step down from her role as poet laureate of Queens. The same weekend that I travelled to Governor’s Island, Lisella wrote a letter to the Queens Gazette, pointing out that the installation of her replacement in the role is long overdue. “Traditionally,” she wrote, “Queens Poet Laureate candidates were interviewed and judged by a team of local poets, representatives from Queens’ cultural organizations, colleges such as: St. John’s University, Queens Col­lege, as well as the Queens Council on the Arts, Queens Museum, Queens Theater, thus creating a broad base of contacts for the in­coming Queens Poet Laureate.”

Her letter ended with a call to action that others write to Queens Gazette to encourage the Borough President to act upon this next appointment. This call was answered by Bruce Whitacre, a fun and generous poet with a new book out, by KC Trommer, founder of Queensbound, “ a collaborative audio project founded in 2018 that seeks to connect writers across the borough, showcase and develop a literature of Queens, and reflect the borough back to itself,” by poet and librarian Micah Zevin and by Dr. Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, poet laureate of Suffolk County.

Apparently, letters to the editor at the Queens Gazette are addressed to QGazette@AOL.com.

In case you’d like to join the ranks.