Faculty Profiles

Tom D'Angelo was born in the now fashionable and expressive neighborhood of Astoria, NY. The first of his family to attend college, he received his master's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from Queens College/CUNY. In addition to a collection of his original poetry, his master's thesis included his verse translations of selected biblical narratives from the Book of Genesis. Since joining the English faculty at NCC in 2000, Professor D'Angelo has worked in the Writing Center and has taught courses in Mythology and Folklore, Film and Literature, and Creative Writing. His current projects include a series of creative non-fiction essays on his formative years in Queens, NY and poems "assembled" from found words and phrases from The New York Times.

Sabrina Davis first joined the English Department at Nassau Community College in 2009 and has served as the Creative Writing Program Coordinator since the program’s inaugural semester in fall of 2016. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Saint Louis University, an M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University, and a B.A. in History from CUNY Baruch College. Born and raised on Long Island, she currently resides in Lloyd Harbor, NY with her husband and two children.

Amy King's book, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. Of I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press), John Ashbery describes Amy King's poems as bringing "abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living." Safe was one of Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2011. King joins the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt & Rachel Carson as the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women's National Book Association). She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edited the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.

Mary Lannon is a 2020 recipient of a New Work Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, a 2021 City Artist Corp grant recipient, and a finalist in the 2019 Iron Horse Literary Review Trifecta Contest. Her short stories have been published at Story, New World Writing(ed. Frederick Bartheleme),Woven Tale Press (prose editor DeWitt Henry) and The Write Launch. Her poetry appears at Queen Mob's Teahouse and at Poets of Queens and her play was shortlisted for the Bechdel Group's play-in-progress reading series.  She belongs to the NYC Irish American Writers and Artists group and runs a reading series in Kew Gardens, NY where she lives. At work on a second novel, she is looking for a publishing home for her first novel. She has taught at NCC since 2007.

Richard Jeffrey Newman has been a member of Nassau Community College’s English Department since 1989. His books of poetry include Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006). He has also co-translated four books of classical Persian poetry, most recently The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). Professor Newman has been curating the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, NY since 2012.

Joe Pilaro studied theater and fiction writing at the University of Vermont. He has directed many plays and musicals, and adapted and directed The Emperor's New Clothes and The LIttle Prince for a touring children theater company in Vermont. He has worked as the Program Coordinator of Columbia University's Film School and taught writing at Howard University. In the late nineties, What Your Hairdresser Knows, a play he co-wrote with his writing partner Joe Gorrie, was produced by the Homegrown Theater in New York. They relocated to Los Angeles and wrote television spec scripts, an animated series, and feature film scripts. He has taught creative writing at West Los Angeles College and has taught at NCC since 2011.

Christina M. Rau is the author of the poetry collection What We Do To Make Us Whole (Alien Buddha Press 2021), the Elgin Award-winning Liberating The Astronauts (Aqueduct Press 2017), and the chapbooks WakeBreatheMove and For The Girls, I. She’s served as Poet in Residence for both Oceanside Library NY and Cedarmere and was named Long Island Poet of the Year by Walt Whitman Birthplace. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including her favorites fillingStation and The Disappointed Housewife as well as on the airwaves for Destinies on WSUB. In her non-writing life, when she’s not teaching yoga or offering reiki, she’s watching the Game Show Network. www.christinamrau.com

Matthew Rotando has published poems and/or illustrated poems in various places, including Eoagh, Wavelength, BigCityLit.com, Drunken Boat, Everyday Genius, Matador, Oddball Magazine, Acta Victoriana, Green Linden, and Politics Slash Letters magazines. He has written two poetry books, The Comeback's Exoskeleton (2008) and Hail (2020), published by Upset Press, a division of the University of Nebraska Press. He has a B.A. in English Literature from Duke University, an M.F.A. in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from University of Arizona. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Sri Lanka, attached to the University of Peradeniya, in Kandy, where he wrote a manuscript of poems connected to his time living in monasteries and accompanying monks on walking pilgrimages around the island. While there he also taught creative writing workshops and edited and published Slippage, a collection of fiction, non-fiction and poetry written by Sri Lankans, under the pseudonym M. Abayaratana. He has also taught poetry and surrealist writing workshops at the University of Arizona Poetry Center as a visiting poet. His poem “Story of Learning” won the University of Arizona Academy of American Poets award, judged by Srikanth Reddy. He is a winner of the Carol Farber Honor’s Program Excellence in Teaching Award at NCC. 

Beth Beatrice Smith holds a B.A. in English from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from The New School. She is a former assistant editor for Essence Magazine and the former managing editor of Blackballot.com. Professor Smith has served as chair of the Creative Writing Project and is the current fiction editor for The Nassau Review.  She joined the faculty English department in 2006. 

Tim Wood is the author of two books of poems, Otherwise Known as Home (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Notched Sunsets (Atelos, 2016). He is also co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008). His critical work on poetry and poetics can be found at ActionYes.org and Jacket2.org as well as in Convolution and Leviathan; his poetry reviews can be found at the Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and the Boston Review. In 2017, his poem "Marginalia Inter Alia" won The Elizabeth Curry Poetry Contest, and his poem "Shiki" was first-runner up for RHINO magazine's Founder's Award. He also had a poem included in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. Ed. Abiodun Oyewole, one of the original Last Poets. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from U.C. Berkeley and an M.F.A. in Poetry from The Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany from 2013 to 2014, where he taught courses on hip-hop as literature and on American poetry. He is currently a professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York.

John Dermot Woods writes stories and draws comics in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of several comics and works of fiction, including The Baltimore Atrocities (Coffee House Press), Mortals (Radix Media), and Activities (Publishing Genius). He enjoys playing tennis on New York City’s cracked courts and surfing along New York City’s temperamental and often frigid shoreline.