Authors of Winchester Gardens include, from left, back row, Morrel Cohen, Chet Feinberg and Bing Chang; and, front row, Gillian Brown, Daniela Gioseffi and Harriet Ribot.
A writer’s club at Winchester Gardens in Maplewood is being facilitated by Daniela Gioseffi, whose earliest years were spent in Orange and Newark.
Gioseffi moved on to New York, where she lived for 50 years and published 18 books with major publishing companies before she retired to Winchester Gardens four years ago.
“I missed author friends in the city,” Gioseffi said, “so, I founded the Writing Club of Winchester Gardens to bring together residents who enjoy creative writing.”
Club members include Morrel Cohen, a 97-year-old retired professor who had a chair in physics and biology at the University of Chicago and continues to have post-retirement appointments at Rutgers and Princeton.
A newly minted poet, Cohen is now publishing a children’s book on wild bird sightings he’s enjoyed, and finishing a memorial chapbook of celebratory poems, about his more than 70-year marriage to his wife Sylvia, who shared a comfortable life at Winchester Gardens with him for many years.
Another member is Chet Feinberg, who is an author of light verse as adept at humor as Ogden Nash. Feinberg, who is 94, provides comic relief for the residents and has been publishing his short verse in the Winchester Gardens Chronicle, a quarterly newsletter shared by the residents.
Club member Bing Chang was an information technologist and he is now interested in artificial intelligence. Since English is his second language, he’s been writing poems that he passes through Chat GPT for suggestions that help him perfect his own creativity. Bing is a worldly gentleman who is also an adept ball room dancer with his graceful wife Lucy Chang. They have entertained the residents of Winchester Gardens at New Year’s Eve Parties.
Gillian Brown taught literature and writing at the University of New Orleans, and to medical students at Tulane University. Brown has been published in distinguished literary magazines and is completing a moving book of poems based on her experience with her husband’s memory loss. Residents find her poems very touching to share as they offer a subject with which many find empathetic understanding.
Harriet Ribot was an emergency room nurse and a mother of four accomplished sons but she found time to write poetry all her life even as she managed her physician husband’s medical office. She began publishing books in her 90s and had two book party launches at Winchester Gardens since moving in three years ago. She is finishing a book of short stories that will be published soon.
Daniela Gioseffi and Jackie Herships are members of the Essex Country Ethical Culture Society where Gioseffi has read her poems, and Herships holds a Life Coaching class.
In November, Gioseffi, the 84-year-old leader of the group will have her 18th book, “Stardust Lives in Us,” published by VIA Folios Press at The City University of New York. It will be her sixth book of poetry.
Gioseffi’s given hundreds of speeches and readings across the United States and Europe from her six books of poetry, three novels, and three anthologies of world literature from Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and The Feminist Press: NY.
Her compendium “On Prejudice, A Global Perspective,” won a World Peace Prize from The Ploughshares Fund and was presented at the United Nations. Her anthology “Women on War: International Writings from Antiquity to the Present” won an American Book award and has been in print for more than 40 years as a Women’s Studies classic. Her comic feminist novel, “The Great American Belly Dance,” was optioned for a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Michael Christofer.
“Being among the talented elders of Winchester Gardens keeps me stimulated and productive,” said Gioseffi with a smile. “We keep each other lively.”
About the Author
