He was a school board member from 1994 to 1997. He is currently the Oceanside library’s special projects coordinator, As part of his duties, he has developed an email list and set up the library’s Facebook page, opening up the library to new users. For several years in the 1990s he was president of Kiwanis.

As if all that community leadership weren’t enough, Iovino is an acclaimed attorney, an author and a poet. He says that his favorite undertaking is the gazebo readings, which are clearly labor-intensive. “With 30,000 emails to go out each week, a weekly newsletter, setting up the readings and deciding on the food,” he said, “the program takes up a large amount of my time outside my legal office.”

It is also one of residents’ favorite things to do during the summer. “The readings cross many plains,” says Transom, who is vice president of the school board and president of Oceanside Community Service. “Tony knows everybody — the school board, the teachers, Kiwanis, everybody. He also brings in people from other parts of Nassau County to read their poetry or other material. He started it, formulated how it works, gets the authors and keeps track of everything. All I do is supply the food.”

Oceanside resident Linda Engle says she never misses the readings. “Tony Iovino has given Oceanside residents a relaxing, entertaining and unique way to spend Monday nights during the summer,” she said. “People come with their friends, their children and their pets to enjoy listening to authors read their work.”

Iovino occasionally reads the work of other poets, and although he is a published author in his own right, participants do not remember him reading his own work. He wrote his latest novel, “Notary Public Enemy,” in 2011. His essays and poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies.