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brenda connor-bey

An award winning poet, writer, and arts-in-education consultant, Brenda Connor-Bey was named the first Poet Laureate of Greenburgh, New York. She is the founder of MenWem Writers Workshop, a member of Slapering Hol Press Advisory Committee, the Harlem Writers’ Workshop, the Poetry Caravan, and the Advisory Committee for the Westchester Center for Creative Aging. She is a recipient of the Westchester Fund for Women and Girls’ Outstanding Arts Educator Award, a New York state CAPS award for poetry, four PEN awards for non-fiction (B.H.R.A.G.S. Celebrates Its People’s Culture, The Brooklyn Museum), and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. She is a MacDowell, YADDO and Cave Canem Regional Fellow. She is the author of Thoughts of an Everyday Woman/An Unfinished Urban Folktale, a collection of prose and poetry. Recently she completed a chapbook of poetry, Through the Mists of Remembering, and a collection of poetry, Crossroad of the Serpent. Brenda is also working on a young adult novel and a novel.

She teaches creative writing at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and The Kids’ Short Story Connection. Recent residencies include: Hawthorne Cedar Knolls/Linden Hills Middle and High Schools, Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School, and Highview Elementary School. She was an adjunct professor of creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College Writing. Some residencies were through the Westchester Arts Council, the Neuberger Museum, the Hudson River Museum, and the Katonah Museum. Recently, Brenda’s focus has been designing and facilitating writing for empowerment workshops and arts-in-education professional development workshops for administrators and educators.

Brenda’s work has appeared in numerous anthologies, Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (edited by Amina and Amiri Baraka, Wm. Morrow), Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life (University of Pittsburgh), Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review (North Carolina State University), New Rain 7 (Blind Beggar Press), The Writer in All of Us (edited by June Gould, Ph.D., Dodd Mead), Sunbury 9 (Sunbury Press), and literary journals, Main Trend Magazine (Main Trend), Five A.M. (University of Pittsburgh) and Writing (Scholastic). Her work has been performed by the Lincoln Center Performance Ensemble, Black Women in Theatre, and included in the production of Her Talking Drum, produced by Vinie Burrows at the American Place Theatre in NYC. She’s edited a collection of short stories, Ibo Landing by Ishan Bracy (Cool Grove Press), and co-edited two anthologies of poetry, en(compass) (Uganta Press), and Tribute: A Rainbow of Praises (Blind Beggar Press).

Brenda lives in Greenburgh, New York with her husband, James Miller.