Marlene Rosen Fine (1936-2015), Poet and Poetry Society Patron

Marlene Rosen Fine grew up at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—a borough of New York City. She walked this beach while reciting poems by Walt Whitman and Dylan Thomas. She wrote stories and poems, which were published in anthologies and literary magazines. She received the 2010 Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society, where she was a member for over 20 years. Marie Ponsot, who judged the contest, remarked on Marlene's winning poem: "Here's a ravishing lyric. Syntax and sense dance out its music: a first stanza of assertion, a second of directive command, and an agile third, which opens out upon a quiet height of human joy. The poem's only adjective is its last word: it hums with summative, accumulated power."

Marlene shared her poems with family and friends and read in galleries, pubs, coffee houses and bookshops. At twenty-two, while attending graduate school at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Marlene opened, with her husband, Michael J. Fine, The Paper Place bookstore. They returned to New York City to continue their lives with books and writing and a family. Marlene passed away on February 4, 2015 and will be missed by the Poetry Society community.