About

Hello, I’m Henry E. Powderly II, a journalist, writer and musician currently living on Long Island balancing a profession I love as a journalist with my goals as an artist.

Currently, I work as a regional editor for AOL’s hyper-local news platform Patch.com, where I manage 12 Patch sites: Commack, Kings Park, Smithtown, Hauppauge, Three Village, Port Jefferson, Miller Place-Rocky Point, North Fork, Riverhead, Westhampton-Hampton Bays, Southampton and East Hampton. Before that, I spent several years working as Web Editor for Long Island Business News, a position I earned after working as an assistant editor for the business-focused publication. Before moving to Long Island I worked for community weeklies in Ulster County and a print-on-demand publisher in Poughkeepsie, New York.

If you’d like to connect with me professionally, click here to view my LinkedIn profile.

When it comes to my creative work, I have written two novels which I hope to one day publish, as well as many poems and stories. I am currently working on a chapbook of nature poetry, a series of short fiction pieces inspired by Harvard Sentences and a collection of longer stories. Some of my favorite writers are Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Nikos Kazantzakis, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg and J.D. Salinger. I studied creative writing at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

I am also a saxophonist, pianist and composer. Though saxophone and jazz have been my main focuses in the past, these days I focus on piano improvisations and
compositions. I have studied at Manhattan School of Music and The New School before moving upstate to study writing at SUNY New Paltz. I have played numerous gigs in New York and in the Ulster/Dutchess and Orange County areas. I am a good pianist, though I usually use that instrument to compose and improvise rather than to play professionally. That means I can’t play Rachmaninoff (and most Chopin). My favorite musicians/composers are John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, Dmitri Shostakovitch, Erik Satie, Charles Mingus and Bill Evans.

This website will showcase my art, which includes one of my newer loves: photography. I’ll post stories and poems, I’ll share excerpts of my novels and post music compositions and recordings. If you would like to connect with me on Facebook, click here.

Any questions should be sent to henry(dot)powderly(at)gmail.com.