Here's an excerpt from a Columbia News Service feature by Laura Cameron about OTBKB Verse Responder, Leon Freilich. We're so proud. Read the rest at Columbia News Service.

He has tried his hand at both. In the
’60s, he wrote fiction on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where drugs were
cheap and General Francisco Franco’s police turned a blind eye.

When that turned out to be unsuccessful, he came back New York and
worked as a teacher until he grew tired of it. He had studied Latin and
Greek at City College, which he said was good preparation for his next
stint, as a journalist writing about scandal for the National Enquirer
and Star magazine.

But when Star moved its operations south to Florida,
Freilich says he decided to do what he loved. So he loafed for a bit
and when he, again, grew tired of that, he began writing a column for
the local weekly, the Brooklyn Paper.

It was during this time that he was named poet laureate by the paper’s editor in chief, Gersh Kuntzman.

A few years ago, the paper cut Freilich’s column, so he retired from
the newspaper business. But he held on to his title as the local bard
and began posting light verse online, including on the New York Times
blogs City Room and Paper Cuts, the media gossip site Gawker and the
community forum Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

Even though it doesn’t
pay the bills, Freilich’s position as poet laureate has given him an
incentive to put his work out to the public. In a poem posted on Only
the Blog Knows Brooklyn, Freilich versifies on life as a writer:

Dead Letters Dept.

It’s bad enough when your hair’s falling out,

Leading to middle-age rage,

But if you’re a writer, how worse it is

When your words fall off the page.