A former English teacher who has had their work published in the past was named the 2019 Bucks County Poet Laureate.
Mary Jo LoBello Jerome, a resident New Hope, was announced the winner of the 43rd annual contest that is put on by Bucks County Community College and sponsored by the Bucks County Commissioners.
Dr. Ethel Rackin, who leads the poet laureate program, said Jerome began writing poetry as a teenager and rose to the top of the 90 entries in the contest.
“I am constantly writing, making notes and observations, and reading,” Jerome 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.”
The former teacher said she was humbled to have won the competition.
Jerome will read her poetry at a reception at Tyler Hall on the Newtown Township campus on Sunday, November 17 at 2 p.m. She will later receive a $500 honorarium and a proclamation from the county.
Before winning the 2019 contest, Jerome took the top prize at the inaugural Doylestown’s Main Street Voices poetry competition in 2015. Her 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 former high school English teacher, who has taught writing at colleges, has previously lived in Rotterdam, Tokyo, and Blairstown, New Jersey, before moving to New Hope nearly a decade ago.
The contest runner-ups were Tricia Crawford Coscia, of Morrisville; Lynda Gene Rymond, of Quakertown; and Melinda Rizzo of Quakertown.
A Black Stone
water worn with pleasing heft,
smooth, almost heart-shaped but lopsided,
the misshapen valentine we found
on that rocky Cape Breton coast, an oddity
so appealing that even Eros lost
in thought would have rolled it rhythmically
in his palm for long minutes before he
dropped it back into the sea. One lobe, distinctly
larger, and we joked half afraid on that misty
beach just three days after our wedding,
our bare feet raw in the surf, would this rock
be the mineral totem of our life?
Crooked, petrified, solitary.
Not us, we vowed. I snuck it home. And now
decades later, forgotten then found
again and again in the velvet-lined jewelry box
inherited from my mother, it’s still solid, silky,
metamorphic, asymmetrical,
one lobe more hulky, forever beating
harder for the weaker side. The smaller
ventricle, sometimes me, sometimes you.
— Mary Jo LoBello Jerome
— First published by Schuylkill Valley Journal, Vol. 48, 2019
