Chuck O’Neil grew up during the 1950s and 60s in Norwich, Connecticut, a mostly working-class city with a rich manufacturing past, where the Yantic and Shetucket flow into the Thames River, which in turn runs east to New London on Long Island Sound.

After graduating from Providence College, where he edited the literary magazine, ‘two roads diverged,’ he says, and rather than go to Ireland for graduate work, he chose ‘the one less traveled by,’ a commune in upstate New York.

There he met Celeste Fuqua, who would become his wife. In 1982, they moved with their four children to Milford, Pennsylvania, a town of about a thousand souls located on the Delaware River, seventy miles west of New York City.

Chuck played the drums in a number of bands based in Connecticut and New York over a period of twenty-five years. He continues to write poetry, ever since those early years in college, influenced back then by the likes of Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell.

He owned an architectural woodworking business for forty-two years, and with Celeste, continues to live in Milford, where he served as president of the Historic Preservation Trust of Pike County, and was a member of the Architectural Review Board.

In 2022 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Milford, PA.