Margo Taft Stever, Donald W. Stever and the Hudson Valley Writers Center to receive Annual Preservation Award during Wine Tasting Party

The Historical Society Inc., serving Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown will honor Margo Taft Stever, Donald W. Stever, and the Hudson Valley Writers Center (HVWC) with its annual Preservation Award on Friday, September 8, 2023. The wine tasting event and award program is from 7 to 9 pm on the grounds of the 1848 Jacob Odell House in Tarrytown.

Conferring the Preservation Award is an important component of the Society’s annual fundraiser. The evening starts with a wine tasting and nibbles and sweets contributed by local restaurants. The house is open to view the exhibition “Signed, Sealed and Documented,” which features original documents, maps, photographs, school records, and other written/drawn objects from the Society’s collection.

Tickets are $100 for members and $125 for the public. Information about special donor levels and greetings for the honorees is available on the Society’s website: https://www.thehistoricalsociety.net/events-2/2023-annual-wine-tasting-preservation-award/

“The Stevers and HVWC’s dedication to history and historic preservation makes them worthy recipients of the 2023 Preservation Award,” said Historical Society Board President Michael Handis.

Margo Stever, an award-winning poet, founded HVWC in 1988, with her husband, Don Stever as a member of the Board of Directors and the center’s attorney. Since 1996 the Center has made its home in the historic Philipse Manor Railroad Station in Sleepy Hollow, which began operating as a stop on the Hudson River Railroad in 1911. Preservation efforts championed by the Stevers and the Writers Center have reinvigorated the riverfront building as a multiuse space in its mission to celebrate the essential art of the written and spoken word. It is listed on the New York State and National Registers of Historic Places.

The Center offers public programs and fosters a vibrant literary arts community that supports and empowers writers and readers of all ages, talents, and backgrounds throughout their creative development. The Center’s volunteers provide free writing programs to a diverse audience of underserved children and their families, including at the RHMS Life Center in Sleepy Hollow. Margo teaches poetry at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents.

Margo Stever is also founder and co-editor of Slapering Hol Press, the HVWC’s small press imprint with fifty volumes of mostly emerging and often diverse poets. Her many poetry collections and publications include the recent The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Achievement Book Award. Don is an world-renowed environmental lawyer, professor, and author who has actively worked to preserve and clean up the Hudson River waterfront. While serving as a local official in Sleepy Hollow, NY, he wrote a local law that caused the demolition and site cleanup to stricter than state or federal standards of the former GM automobile assembly plant on the Hudson River waterfront, the site of which now includes a large residential area and public park.

Recent Preservation Award honorees include Westchester County Executive George Latimer for his work to secure funding for the restoration of the beloved lighthouse; Tarrytown Village Historian Richard Rose, a force for historical accuracy and preservation in our villages; JoAnne Murray, president and owner of Allan Block Insurance; the late local legend Armando “Chick” Galella; the Philipse Manor Eagle Restoration Committee; and Paul and Maria Birgy, who are restoring the Acker-Forkill House in Tarrytown.