New Hope Woman Named Bucks Co. Poet Laureate

NEW HOPE, PA — A New Hope resident has been named the 2019 Bucks County Poet Laureate, officials at Bucks County Community College recently announced.

Mary Jo LoBello Jerome, a retired educator who began writing poetry as a teenager, rose to the top of 90 entries in the 43rd annual contest, according to Ethel Rackin, director of the poet laureate program administered by the college.

Jerome, in a news release published by the college, said she’s honored and humbled to have won such a prestigious competition.

“I am constantly writing, making notes and observations, and reading,” she said. “The power and beauty of words can literarily take my breath away, or as Emily Dickinson described poetry, I can feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”

Jerome will be honored with a poetry reading and reception at 2 p.m. Nov. 17 at Bucks’ Newtown campus. She will receive a proclamation from Bucks County and a $500 honorarium.

Jerome’s poems and stories have been published in The Stillwater Review, River Heron Review, Schuykill Valley Journal, US1 Worksheets, Little Patuxent Review, Short Story, and Center magazines.

The inaugural winner of Doylestown’s Main St. Voices poetry competition in 2015, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net award. She is currently working on a collection of poems.

She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has written for the New York Times, Scholastic Publications, and numerous other magazines. A former high school English teacher and associate professor of writing at regional colleges, Jerome, along with her husband and two daughters, lived in Rotterdam, Tokyo, and Blairstown, New Jersey, before settling in New Hope nearly a decade ago.

The judges also named three runners-up in the contest: Tricia Crawford Coscia of Morrisville, Lynda Gene Rymond of Quakertown, and Melinda Rizzo of Quakertown. They have been invited to read at the reception, along with 2018 Bucks County Poet Laureate Carly Volpe and preliminary judge Chad Frame.