On 4/18/18, the Journal of New Jersey Poets held its Issue 55 release reading in the County College of Morris library, featuring the work of three contributors.

EMARI DIGIORGIO is the author of Girl Torpedo, the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She’s received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.

MEGHAN PRIVITELLO is the author of A New Language for Falling out Love (YesYes Books, 2015), Notes on the End of the World(Black Lawrence Press, 2016), and One God at a Time (forthcoming, YesYes Books, 2019). Poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, A Public Space, Boston Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, & elsewhere. She is the recipient of a NJ State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

JOE SALERNO was born in the Bronx in 1947 and moved to New Jersey with his family when he was seven. He received his B.A. in English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he edited the literary magazine Now. His graduate work was done at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Donald Hall and Robert Hayden. In 1972, Joe won the Hopwood Award, Michigan’s most coveted prize for poetry. He continued to write and to publish in such well-known magazines as Wormwood Review and Yankee, and he received a 1982 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in poetry. Joe Salerno died of lung cancer on November 22,1995. He is survived by his wife Beverly and his three children, David, Miriam, and Daniel.