Born in Haverhill, Mass., Al Basile was the first to receive a Master's degree from Brown University's writing program. He was the first trumpet player for Roomful of Blues in the mid-Seventies, and since the eighties has appeared as writer and horn player on albums and DVDS by Roomful founder Duke Robillard. He formed his own record company Sweetspot Records in 1998, and has released seventeen solo albums featuring almost 200 of his songs. He has been nominated eight times for a Blues Music Award, including one in 2016 as Best Contemporary Blues Album for his CD Mid-Century Modern. His songs have been covered by Ruth Brown, Johnny Rawls, and the Knickerbocker All Stars. Guests on his own releases include the Blind Boys of Alabama, Sista Monica Parker, Sugar Ray Norcia, Jerry Portnoy, and jazz great Scott Hamilton. Celebrated for his mastery of lyric writing as well as music, Al's skill with words extends to his other career as a poet: he is published regularly in leading journals and has two previous books, A Lit House (Winnikinni Press, 2012), and Tonesmith (Antrim House, 2017). He won the Meringoff Award for Poetry in 2015, and his verse radio play Flash Blind was featured at the HEARnow festival for American audio theater in the summer of 2020. He was a teacher of English, music, and physics in a private Rhode Island high school for 25 years before devoting himself to music and poetry full time in 2005. He has given talks on lyric writing at Boston University, and for the last two years he has taught lyric writing, led panels, and performed at the West Chester Poetry Conference. In 2020 he became a member of the Powow River poets.