Speech Professor Golda Solomon Named First Poet Laureate of Yonkers

Golda Solomon, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Speech, Communications and Theatre Arts Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) — and who teaches at BMCC’s CUNY in The Heights (CITH) campus — was named the first poet laureate of the City of Yonkers by Mayor Mike Spano at a ceremony on February 16 in front of Yonkers City Hall.

Professor Solomon, a life-long New Yorker, grew up in Brooklyn at the corner of Church and Nostrand. “I have a student at CITH who lives in the same building, same floor,” she says. “New York City is really all about those six degrees of separation.” A product of CUNY, she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in speech at Brooklyn College and joined BMCC as a speech professor in 1968.

“BMCC was at 50^th and Broadway in midtown when I started working there,” she says. “I was teaching fundamentals of speech and public speaking, which I still teach today. I also teach electives such as advanced public speaking and interpersonal communications.”

Having retired from teaching full-time in 1992, Professor Solomon continued teaching at BMCC part time and has mentored BMCC student poets down through the years.

“I always introduce poetry as part of the creative process in our classes,” she says. “Sometimes my students attend the open mics at the Blue Door Art Center in Yonkers, where I serve as poet-in-residence and lead projects such as Writing Art Values Empowerment and Sharing, or WAVE. I try to make them feel comfortable speaking in public and I love bringing people together through writing and poetry.”

Another constant in her life’s work has been a love of jazz. Professor Solomon is a founding member of The Jazz & Poetry Choir Collective, and a creator of Poetry in Partnership with Jazz, or Po’Jazz. Her work has been supported by funding from Poets & Writers and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Yonkers Initiative. She has collaborated on events with The Science Barge, which is docked in Yonkers, and plans to expand these activities through her role as poet laureate, a volunteer position that lasts two years.

“One project in the works is a poetry workshop for recent immigrants from Afghanistan being housed in newly constructed housing in Yonkers,” she says. “I also want to start a Go Fly a Poem Day event, where people bring kites and poems fly on the tails on the kites themselves, all over the waterfront at Yonkers, and I’m working with merchants to create Bag-a-Poem, in which businesses put printed poems in the bags of their customers at check-out. These would all be multi-lingual poems, to celebrate the diversity of Yonkers.”

Professor Solomon’s poetry collections include Flatbush Cowgirl and Medicine Woman of Jazz. Her CDs include Po’Jazz: Takin’ It To the Hollow, First Sets, Jazz Riffs and We Are. Reflecting the talent of BMCC’s faculty, she happens to be the College’s second inaugural poet laureate. English Professor Marguerite Rivas was named Staten Island’s first poet laureate in 2019.