Mineola Resident Named New Nassau Poet Laureate

Mineola resident Mario Susko has been selected as the Fourth Nassau County Poet Laureate by the Nassau County Poet Laureate Society.

Susko is the author of 31 poetry collections and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1997 and 2006 Nassau Review Poetry Award, the 1988 Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Letterature “Nuove Lettere” (Italy), the 2000 Tin Ujevic Award for the best book of poems published in Croatia in 1999, among others.

In 2012 he was named by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year, elected member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and given the CCHA Regional Distinquished Humanities Educator Award. He has read his poetry both internationally and domestically. 

Susko’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies in Croatia, India, Italy, Hungary, Sweden and Austria, among others. He is also known as an editor and translator of major American writers, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, James Baldwin, Theodore Roethke, and e.e. cummings.

Susko received his M.A. and Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook in the early 70’s; a witness and survivor of the war in Bosnia, he came back to the US in 1993. He teaches in the English Department at Nassau Community College in Garden City.

Susko will be officially installed at the Farmingdale Public Library on Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 2 p.m.

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