President
Isaac Myers III is the founder and editor of Curlew, New York’s literary and photo journal. C.Q. publishes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including nearly all forms of reporting and journalism, along with portraits of poets and writers in their homes and work spaces accompanied by interviews. Ultimately, the journal aims to help poets and writers carve out residencies within the city and to help keep the fabric of the literary history and tradition of New York City’s ever-changing neighborhoods intact. He graduated from Drake University Law School and holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street as well as the Best American Poetry blog. As an attorney, his practice areas focus on residential and commercial real estate.
Vice President
Jessica Greenbaum’s first book, Inventing Difficulty, was awarded the Gerald Cable Prize and praised by George Steiner as a “first book by a poet very much to be listened to.” Her second book, The Two Yvonnes, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and recognized by Library Journal as one of the Best Books of Poetry in 2012. Her most recent book, Spilled and Gone, was recognized by the Boston Globe as a Best Book of 2021. She is the coeditor of the anthologies Mishkan Haseder: A Passover Haggadah and Tree Lines: 21st century American Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA and PSA, she teaches inside and outside academia, including at Barnard College, Vassar, Dorot’s UWS senior center and both Central Synagogue and Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. As a social worker she has also taught poetry with communities who have experienced trauma.
Treasurer
Named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, Jason Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge. A second-generation Korean American poet, he is the author of the poetry collections More Than Mere Light, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island and coeditor of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. The winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute, he earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is an associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University and lives in Beacon, NY.
Secretary
Emily Blair works as a web developer and graphic designer. Her poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Sixth Finch, New Ohio Review, the Gettysburg Review and elsewhere. She has received New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and fiction, along with a Xeric Foundation Comic Publishing Grant and a Stein Scholarship from the Center for Book Arts. She holds a BA in fine arts from Wesleyan University and an MFA in graphics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In addition to writing, she creates artists’ books and collaborates on social practice projects with Michelle Illuminato under the name Next Question.
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was published in March 2021 and was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, the New York Times Book Review and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, where she works as a clinical psychologist.
Rozanne Gold is a celebrated chef, food writer, and journalist. At age 23, she was first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, and later consulting chef to the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World. The winner of four James Beard Awards, she is the author of thirteen acclaimed cookbooks and host of the podcast One Woman Kitchen. A graduate of Tufts University, Ms. Gold holds an MFA in poetry from the New School, where she teaches “The Language of Food.” A finalist of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Prize, her chapbook Mother Sauce will be published by dancing girl press, fall 2022. Noted poet Annie Finch called her a “geographer of women’s souls” and her poems “powerful recipes for wisdom and compassion.” Her work has appeared in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among many other national publications. She has lived in Brooklyn with her husband for thirty-four years.
Modesto “Flako” Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised theater maker, producer and educator. ATI Best Actor Award Winner for 2016 and HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer for 2017, Jimenez is best known for original productions and three signature festivals produced with his company Oye Group. Jimenez has appeared in the New York Times Critic’s Pick Taxilandia (Oye Group, New York Theatre Workshop, the Bushwick Starr, the Tank), Early Shaker Spirituals (Wooster Group), Last Night At the Palladium (Bushwick Starr/3LD); Yoleros (Bushwick Starr/IATI theater), Conversations Pt.1: How to Make It Black in America (JACK), Take Me Home (3LD/Incubator Arts Project), Richard Maxwell’s Samara (Soho Rep.), and Kaneza Schaal’s Jack & (BAM). In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in the Public Theater Under the Radar Festival with his show Oye For My Dear Brooklyn. Currently, Flako is working on Margarita, Mercedes y Dementia, a multidisciplinary memory play exploring the relationships between matriarchy and ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how our own identity can impact our mental health.
Before cofounding Nonfiction Research, Gunny was the head of strategy at VICE Media’s digital agency, where he oversaw a team of strategists working on brands such as Unilever, Kraft, Activision, Rolex, and VICE properties such as VICELAND and VICE Impact. Prior to VICE, Gunny was head of strategy at Tenthwave Digital (now Accenture Interactive), where he led strategy engagements for BlackRock and helped make Duncan Hines the most shared CPG brand on Facebook. A graduate of Columbia University, Gunny lived in New York City for twenty-five years and served as Brooklyn Poets’ first board president for eight years. He now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and daughter.
Tiffany Gibert is a writer, editor and communications professional who has worked for nonprofits and media companies from New York to Singapore, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Time Out New York and Penguin Random House. After five years in New York—where she lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, home to the city’s best key lime pie, cobblestones and blacksmiths—she now resides in Washington, DC, and manages digital content at the Public Broadcasting Service.
Caroline Gonzalez has over fifteen years of experience in urban policy, advocacy and strategic communications. Her passion is in helping to create vibrant and effective communities that realize cool and meaningful things—which she has done through education reform policy work, in public-private partnerships around economic development, as a social entrepreneur working with artisan cooperatives, and on the Obama campaign and administration. A native New Yorker who loves parks, painting and gardening, she now lives in Mexico with her family. She served as one of the three founding board directors of Brooklyn Poets.
JP Howard is the author of SAY/MIRROR (The Operating System, 2016), a 2016 Lambda Literary finalist, and the chaplet bury your love poems here (Belladonna*, 2015). She has received a Lambda Emerging Writer Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism, and she is a 2018 featured author in Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools program. The winner of fellowships from Cave Canem, VONA and Lambda, she curates the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Salon and has facilitated numerous writing workshops for Apogee, the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, City College and others. Howards holds a BA in English from Barnard College, a JD from Brooklyn Law School and an MFA in creative writing from City College. She served as a Brooklyn Poets board director for two years.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of Milk (Wave, 2018), Rome (Norton/Liveright, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave, 2012), Black Life (Wave, 2010) and Awe (Wave, 2007). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry Is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), and coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s, 2013). She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, an EdM in arts in education from Harvard and an EdD in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She served as a Brooklyn Poets board director for two years.