About

Hello, I’m Henry E. Powderly II, a journalist, writer and musician currently living on Long Island who’s trying to balance a profession I enjoy as an Internet producer and editor with my goals as an artist.

Professionally, I’m a journalist, working as a regional editor for AOL’s hyper-local news platform Patch.com. If you’d like to connect with me professionally, click here to view my LinkedIn profile.

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 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 blog will showcase a lot of my art, which includes one of my newer loves: photography. I’ll post stories and poems, I’ll share excerpts of my novels and chronicle my process of editing them, and I’ll also post spontaneous compositions often inspired by events or photos or prompts.

If you would like to connect with me on Facebook, click here.

I also keep a pretty active Twitter profile. If you would like to follow along, click here.

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