Arts Services Initiative of Western New York is excited to welcome Rachelle Toarmino as our new Communications and Development Manager. Rachelle is the first to fill this brand-new position for the eight-year-old nonprofit.

“We are thrilled to bring Rachelle on board for this new position at ASI,” Executive Director Jen Swan said. “This position fulfills one of our strategic plan’s main goals: a renewed focus on branding the ASI name and mission to reach a wider audience through our programs and services. As we head into our 10-year anniversary in a few years, alongside our recent office relocation to the Tri-Main Center, we are at a critical point in ASI’s growth.”

Rachelle’s background includes both grassroots marketing and corporate communications experience. She is the cofounder and editor in chief of Peach Mag, an online literary magazine and publisher of in-print anthologies, and previously worked as a content specialist in the brand and marketing department of a major national law firm.

Rachelle has been involved in Western New York’s thriving arts and culture sector for several years. Among her many responsibilities at Peach Mag, she curates the magazine’s Buffalo-based reading series and writes book reviews for its column in The Public. She also edits and designs the magazine’s in-print anthologies, including its Yearbook series and With You: Withdrawn Poetry of the #MeToo Movement. She has presented locally and nationally on emerging trends and developments affecting the publishing industry, and in 2017, she served on the editorial advisory board of My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry.

“ASI’s mission of providing artists and arts organizations with the tools and resources needed to be sustainable is one I care deeply about,” Rachelle said. “I’m excited to contribute my marketing and development skills to an organization whose programs and services I find so indispensable to our region.”

In addition to her professional work, Rachelle is a poet and creative writer. She is the author of several chapbooks, including Graphic and Personal & Generic, and her poems and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Metatron Press, Shabby Doll House, and other places online and in print, and anthologized in My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry and Cosmonauts Avenue: The Anthology. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction Prize with guest judge Ocean Vuong, longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize with guest judge Tommy Pico, and named Buffalo Seminary’s Elizabeth McNulty Wilkinson Poet.

For more information, Rachelle can be reached at [email protected] or her full profile can be read here.

(Photo: Nancy J. Parisi)