Sydell Rosenberg was born Sydell Lorraine Gasnick on December 15, 1929 in New York City, the youngest of five children. At an early age, Sydell displayed a gift for evocative language and an eye for the unusual. She had a singular vision of nature and of life, and she embraced both with a passion that people around her found captivating.

In her early 20s, in one of her first jobs as a copy editor at a small publishing house, she was unimpressed by the quality of the manuscripts she read. She told her boss, “Bernie,” that she could do better. “Prove it,” he said. In short order, Sydell produced a risqué novel, “Strange Circle” under the sobriquet, Gale Sydney. It was published and sold a not unrespectable 200,000 copies. While it would be considered quaint now, for its time, it had a hard-boiled, rather randy style typical of 50s pulp fiction. It’s hard to believe this novel was conjured from the imagination a demure young woman.

Sydell wrote original short stories and also translated from the Spanish (her minor at Brooklyn College). But her abiding love was poetry, especially haiku. She was a charter member of the Haiku Society of America, founded in 1968. Through the years, she contributed numerous poems to HSA’s literary journal, Frogpond, as well as many other anthologies.

In the 70s, Sydell earned her Master’s Degree in linguistics at Hunter College. In addition to writing poetry and other works, Sydell was a dedicated teacher of English as a second language who inspired affection in her students.

Married in 1955 to Sam Rosenberg (deceased in 2003), the couple had two children, Amy (born in 1956) and Nathan (born in 1960). Sydell died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on October 11, 1996, leaving a void in the world of poetry and her loving children, who miss her to this day.