Westchester County Executive George Latimer recently partnered with ArtsWestchester to announce Westchester County’s new Poet Laureate will be Phylisha Villanueva of Yonkers. She was one of 14 applicants for the position and will succeed poet B.K. Fischer who served in this countywide role for three years. Villanueva is slated to begin her three-year term this month and will receive a $10,000 honorarium for each year of the appointment made possible with funds from Westchester County.
County Executive George Latimer said, “There is tremendous literary talent in Westchester and tremendous interest in poetry from people of all ages. The role of the poet laureate is to bring poetry to people and people to poetry and the county looks forward to working with Phylisha and ArtsWestchester to do just that over the next three years.”
Villanueva is a Belizean-American poet, author and cultural activist. She is a teaching artist for ArtsWestchester, a member of the Jazz and Poetry Choir Collective, and Tesoro, an international women’s poet collective. Her written work, including productions and curations, focuses on identity, colorism, inherited trauma, resilience, women’s empowerment, black culture and mysticism. She specializes in community arts development. She co-founded The Yonkers Writing Group and, as a teen, founded the first teen open mic in downtown Yonkers that lasted for five years. Currently, Villanueva is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry at Saint Francis College while serving as a Board advisor and chairperson for the Blue Door Art Center membership committee in Yonkers.
The Westchester Poet Laureate Program embraces both written and spoken poetic traditions and seeks to promote poetry as a medium that defies boundaries and categories, serves as a platform for underrepresented voices, and offers a space for personal reflection and healing. Through public facing programming, the poet laureate will mobilize poetry to connect with diverse audiences, to address topics of cultural, social and historical importance, and to show that poetry can bring real meaning and positive social change to people’s lives and communities.
ArtsWestchester is also be partnering with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF)’s Culpeper Arts & Culture Program on the Poet Laureate initiative. Over the next three years RBF will provide significant support on the initiative through public-facing programming, including at The Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, artist collaborations and event logistics.
For more than 50 years, ArtsWestchester has been the community’s connection to the arts. Founded in 1965, it is the largest private not-for-profit arts council in New York state. Its mission is to create an equitable, inclusive, vibrant and sustainable Westchester County in which the arts are integral to and integrated into every facet of life.
