Poet Laureate

For further information regarding the Maryland Poet Laureate position please contact Keyonna Penick, Poet Laureate Liaison, at keyonna.penick1@maryland.gov.

• Cavalieri Poet Laureate Governor Hogan Press Release
• Cavalieri - Library of Congress
• The Poet and the Poem Episodes - Library of Congress
• Cavalieri Website and Archived The Poet and The Poem Episodes
• Cavalieri Poetry Foundation Profile
• Cavalieri Selection of Poems and Essays
• "Annapolis Resident Named State Poet," The Baltimore Sun
• "Annapolis Writer Grace Cavalieri named poet laureate of Maryland," Capital Gazette
• January 23, 2019 appearance on the Kojo Nnamdi show on WAMU
• Protector of language's beauty in dark times - WAMU
• Poet, Playwright, Broadcaster - NEA Podcast
• "The Community Writing Workshop Experience" Community Building Art Works
• 13 Poets Laureate Receive Fellowships for Civic Projects - The New York Times
• "The Statesmanship of Being Poet Laureate" - Scene4 International Magazine of Arts and Culture
• "Maryland poet laureate connects the community, creates safe spaces to discover inner thoughts" Capital Gazette
• BWW Review: QUILTING THE SUN Shines at Theater For The New City
• 2019 Arts Council of Anne Arundel County - Annie Award Winner 
• Showboat: A Cavalieri Odyssey
• Grace Cavalieri Receives an ANNIE Award for Literary Arts
• Shine a light on Grace Cavalieri
• Lunar Codex project: Art Catalog

• 1959-1962 Maria Briscoe Coker
• 1962-1979 Vincent Godfrey Burns
• 1979-1985 Lucille Clifton
• 1985-1988 Reed Whittemore
• 1991-1995 Linda Pastan
• 1995-2000 Roland Flint
• 2001-2004 Michael Collier
• 2004-2008 Michael Glaser
• 2008-2012 Stanley Plumly

Grace Cavalieri, Poet Laureate of Maryland, held monthly poetry workshops in MD starting fall of 2019 for young people “who have something to say and would like to learn how to say it”.

This is a pilot program of 8 one-day workshops throughout Maryland that allows teenagers to get in touch with their inner core/heart, get in touch with who they are, and tell their stories in a safe place. It’s now become apparent that the need to reach teens is paramount. One small way is to go where we can reach them. We just call it “Poetry.”

Below is the basic template used for workshops.

Meditation begins the practice and then a discussion of the four basic necessary elements for a good poem, or work of art:

• thinking
• feeling
• senses
• intuition

The meaning of each of the four basic elements are discussed. 

The writing session brings the students within themselves by going through the floors of their lives in an elevator. Each floor represents a different year. This takes personal meditation and silence to obtain a story from one of the “Floors”.

The students leave the area to be alone to write what they “saw” on their “floor.” They return in 15 minutes having written from margin to margin just as they “saw” it. Writers then share what they “saw” on their “floor” with the group. Young writers stay with the narrative and just discuss how it becomes a poem.

The students also write a group sonnet and then use an oral tradition to speak in aloud as a “Crowd” poem.  (Horspiel tradition) (as heard on Podcast) 

Students also finish the sentences:  I wish    I wonder    I dream    I am afraid   etc. (as heard on Podcast)

The writers are given 10 words that have no connection, and they connect them into poems and stories (Samples on Podcast.)

Click here to listen. 

Prince Frederick County MD, November 23, 2019:
Our third workshop in this series was held on November 23, in Prince Frederick County at the Calvert Main Library where teens attended the third Poet Laureate workshop.  Thirteen years of age is the youngest age set for participation, with eighteen years as the ideal top range.

During this workshop, teens found space within themselves to explore unknown territory. Through “writing prompts” that evoke interior experience, they recalled and expressed. The creative process is not therapy, although it has healing effects. We do not question why, we simply acknowledge and share, focusing on language, line lengths, and—more than anything—finding the truth in ourselves. Self-discovery is one main value of writing. The product of our writing is the souvenir.

Each student participated in the writing and recording process because Teens want to be SEEN and HEARD!

This workshop was sponsored by the Fund for the Future of our Children and the Maryland Arts Council.

Click here to listen.

Howard County MD, October 12, 2019:

Our second workshop in this series was held on October 12, 2019 in Howard County, Maryland at Howard County Community College.  Six Middle school students ages 13-7 attended the second Poet Laureate workshop. Thirteen years of age is the youngest age set for participation, with eighteen years as the ideal top range.  

Young writers entered the elevator of their inner lives to find their deepest thoughts. They expressed what in this world made them happy, and what made them afraid. They also enjoy “Photo Ops” and “Microphones,” so dominant in our culture.

Each student participated in the writing and recording process because Teens want to be SEEN and HEARD!  

This workshop was sponsored by the Fund for the Future of our Children, the Maryland Arts Council and the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo) founded in 1974.

Click here to listen.

Salisbury MD, Sept 21, 2019:
The first workshop was held on September 21, 2019 in Salisbury, Maryland.  Eight Middle school students attended the inaugural Poet Laureate workshop. They were 8th graders, age 13. Thirteen is the youngest age set for participation.  

Every person participated and they loved the “photo ops” and “recordings’” because Teens want to be SEEN and HEARD!

Click here to listen.

Karren LaLonde Alenier

Listen to Audio Podcast (29:35 minutes)

Karren LaLonde Alenier is author of six collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation, winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature, and On a Bed of Gardenias: Jane and Paul Bowles, new from Kattywompus Press. Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On,her jazz opera with composer William Banfield, premiered at New York City’s Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater in June 2005. Composer John Supko is collaborating with her on How Many Midnights, an opera love story about Jane and Paul Bowles. She writes for Scene4 Magazine at scene4.com. She maintains a blog at Alenier.blogspot.com.

Maritza Rivera

Listen to Audio Podcast (28:47 minutes)

Maritza Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet and US Army veteran who has lived in Rockville, MD, since 1994.  Maritza is the creator of a short form of poetry called Blackjack and her work appears in literary magazines, anthologies, and online publications.  She is the author of About You, a collection of poetry “for women and the men they love,” and A Mother’s War, written during her son’s two tours in Iraq to make the intensity of war a reality for everyone. Maritza is a contributor to Poets Responding to SB 1070, participates in the Warrior Poetry Project at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, and serves on the Board of Directors of Split This Rock in Washington, DC.

Edgar Gabriel Silex

Listen to Audio Podcast (55:33 minutes)

Edgar Gabriel Silex is the author of two poetry collections from Curbstone Press, Acts of Love (2004) and Through All The Displacements (1995). Recent work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattle and The New American Poets: A Breadloaf Anthology. Silex has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. He is a professor of English at the Maryland Institute and College of Art in Baltimore. He lives in Laurel, Md. with his family.

Rose Solari and James J. Patterson

Listen to Audio Podcast (59:00 minutes)

Rose Solari is a poet, writer, and teacher. She is the author of two full-length collections of poems, Orpheus in the Park and Difficult Weather, and two chapbooks of poems, Selections from Myths & Elegies and The Stolen World. Rose wrote and performed in the multimedia play Looking for Guenevere. Rose is a longtime faculty member at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and a member of its Board of Directors. Rose's work appears in Initiate: An Oxford Anthology of New Writing, from Oxford University's Kellogg College Creative Writing Program.

James J. Patterson says of the act he co-founded in the 1980s, The Pheromones, “We were one of the first bands on MTV and one of the last on American Bandstand.” Born half Canadian, and a longtime Washington, D.C. resident, Patterson has been a political satirist, comedian, songwriter, sportswriter, dramatist, performer, and publisher. He now shares his life and the perspectives gleaned from it in his new book of creative non-fiction, Bermuda Shorts.

Sue Ellen Thompson

Listen to Audio Podcast (28:54 minutes)

Sue Ellen Thompson’s fifth book of poetry, They, was published in September 2014. Her work has been included in the Best American Poetry series, read on National Public Radio by Garrison Keillor, and recently won a Pushcart Prize. She taught at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, Binghamton University, and Central Connecticut State University before moving to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 2006. She now mentors adult poets and teaches workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda and Annapolis. She was awarded the 2010 Maryland Author Prize from the Maryland Library Association.

Belle Waring and Walter Cybulski

Listen to Audio Podcast (57:54 minutes)

Belle Waring's first collection, Refuge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), won the Associated Writing Programs’ Award for Poetry in 1989, the Washington Prize in 1991, and was cited by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of 1990. Dark Blonde (Sarabande Books, 1997) won the the 1997 Poetry Center Book Award (San Francisco State University) and the First Annual Larry Levis Reading Prize in 1998. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Waring has a background in both nursing and teaching. She is currently a science writer in federal service.

Walter Cybulski works as a preservation librarian and has taught preservation courses at the University of Maryland and Catholic University. As Henry Hoynes Poetry Fellow at UVA, he studied with Gregory Orr and John Moffitt.  Published poems are in America, Propago, Eyecatcher, and Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1981).  His work has been called poetry as witness, observation, and meditation. Critics call his work a poetry of the ordinary and the miraculous, in which the living and the dead emerge from memory and history to participate in a shared voice.

Avideh Shashaani

Listen to Audio Podcast (58:45 minutes)

Avideh Shashaani is the founder and president of the Fund for the Future of our Children (FFC), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to developing innovative educational and multicultural programs that encourage the healthy integration of body, mind and heart in children and youth and empower them to be agents of peace in local and global environments. She promotes intercultural and interfaith understanding through lectures, workshops and publications. She is the author of two books, Promised Paradise (poetic prose) and Remember Me (poetry). She has translated 10 Persian mystical texts into English. She served as vice president of the Literary Friends of the DC Public Library for five years. She is a former co-director of the International Institute for Rehabilitation in Developing Countries (founded by the UN, UNESCO, UNDP and Rehabilitation International). She is the past board chair of Refugee Women in Development and the founding chair of MOSAICA: The Center for Nonprofit Development and Pluralism. She holds a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology, a master's degree in educational planning and management and a Ph.D. in Sufi studies.

David Keplinger

Click here for David Keplinger's podcast

David Keplinger is the author of seven poetry books and four volumes of translations from the Danish and German. His most recent books of poems include THE WORLD TO COME (2021), which was awarded the Minds on Fire Open Book Prize from Conduit Books, THE LONG ANSWER: New and Selected Poems (2020), and Another City (2018), which won the 2019 Rilke Prize. In 2020 he was selected for the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and in that same year he was a finalist for the National Translation Award. He teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.

Eva Brann

Click here for Eva Brann's podcast (49:09 minutes)

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for more than sixty years. She holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Yale University and is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. She is the author of thirteen books, all published by Paul Dry Books: Feigning, Pursuits of Happiness, Iron Filings or Scribblings, How to Constitute a World, Doublethink / Doubletalk, Then & Now, Un-Willing, The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments.

Kondwani Fidel

Click here for Kondwani Fidel's podcast    

Kondwani Fidel has used the power of storytelling to confront education reform and civil rights all over the world. He was recently featured on The Tom Hall Show where he discussed his work and life story. Baltimore Magazine honored Fidel with the "Best of Baltimore" in 2021 for his poetic skills. Fidel is the author of The Antiracist, Hummingbirds in the Trenches, and Raw Wounds. In 2020, Fidel released his debut poetry EP "The Mud Was Made For Us," which is multilayered aesthetics of Fidel's steady flow, tactical wordplay, and smooth cadences crooned over laid back jazz beats. He received his BA in English from Virginia State University, and his MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts from the University of Baltimore—and is currently a professor at Coppin State University. NPR called Fidel "one of the nations smartest young Black voices." He is from and based in Baltimore City.

Melvin E. Brown

Click here for Melvin E. Brown's podcast

Melvin E. Brown was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Columbia University and is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, where he received his M.A. He has published two books of poetry, In The First Place and Blue Notes and Blessing Songs. Melvin was the longest serving editor of Chicory, a literary magazine of the Enoch Pratt Free Library; and he is a former faculty member of Sojourner Douglass College and Towson University, where he taught African American Literature and Creative Writing.

Stewart Moss

Click here for Stewart Moss podcast

As a former Executive Director of The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the largest literary centers in the USA, Stewart Moss helped establish creative writing programs for adult immigrants and members of the military being treated for neurological and psychological trauma. Prior to that, he worked as an educator and fundraiser in educational institutions around the country. He has taught literature and creative writing in both the USA and abroad; Scotland, Greece, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, and Nepal are among the countries in which he has lived and worked. Moss has essays included in Retire the Colors: Veterans & Civilians on Iraq & Afghanistan, ed. Dario DiBattista (Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press, 2016) and Plume Poetry and poetry in Plume, Goss183, and Origins Literary Review. His chapbook, For Those Whose Lives Have Seen Themselves: Poems (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2021. He has also been featured in "The Poet and the Poem" podcasts at The Library of Congress. He was educated at Union College (NY) and Harvard University, where he studied the relationship between religion and culture. A native of Boston, MA he resides in Annapolis, MD.

Barbara Goldberg

Click here for Barbara Goldberg podcast

Barbara Goldberg, poet, translator and speechwriter, is the author of 6 prize-winning books of poetry, including the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize for The Royal Baker's Daughter. Her Breaking & Entering: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2022, and was one of 35 books featured by the Kirkus Review. Her book Transformation: The Poetry of Translation received the Valentin Krustev Award. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as awards in translation and fiction, she has also translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Israel poetry. Her work appears in the Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, the Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. As Series Editor of the International Editions for the Word Works, she has selected for publication poets translated from the Kurdish, Ancient Greek and Croatian, the latter of which was shortlisted for ALTA's 2021 National Translation Award.

Taylor Johnson

Click here for Taylor Johnson podcast

Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. and lives in Maryland. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Taylor is the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

Pat Valdata

Click here for Pat Valdata podcast

Pat Valdata is a poet and novelist. Her book about women aviation pioneers, Where No Man Can Touch, won the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her third novel, Eve's Daughters (Moonshine Cove, 2020), won first prize from the Delaware Press Association and received an Honorable Mention from the National Federation of Press Women. Her poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Ekphrastic Review, Italian Americana, Little Patuxent Review, North American Review, Passager, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. In 2021 she received an individual artist award from the Maryland State Arts Council. Pat lives in Crisfield, Maryland, with her husband, Bob Schreiber, and their rescue poodle, Junior. patvaldata.com

Daniel Mark Epstein

Click here for Daniel Mark Epstein podcast

Daniel Mark Epstein is a poet, playwright, and biographer. He has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Dawn to Twilight: New and Selected Poems. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Prix de Rome (Rome Prize) and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received several honorary degrees, most recently an honorary doctorate of letters from Kenyon College in 2020. His poems and biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Abraham Lincoln, and Bob Dylan, have been translated into many languages.

Marita Golden

Click here for Marita Golden podcast

Marita Golden is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include the novels The Wide Circumference of Love, After and The Edge of Heaven and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons and DonÕt Play in the Sun One WomanÕs Journey Through the Color Complex and the anthologies which she edited, Us Against Alzheimer's Stories of Family Love and Faith and Gumbo A Celebration of African American Writing which she edited with the novelist, E. Lynn Harris. Her most recent work of nonfiction is The Strong Black Woman How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women. She is the recipient of many awards including the Writers for Writers Award presented by Barnes & Noble and Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild, and the Fiction Award for her novel After awarded by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has lectured and read from her work internationally.

Pamela Woolford

Click here for Pamela Woolford podcast

Pamela Woolford is a narrative interdisciplinary artist and keynote speaker, intertwining her work as a writer, filmmaker, performer, and immersive-media director to create new forms of narrative work about Black women, Black girls, and others whose joy, imagination, and inner life are under-explored in American media and popular art.

She is the recipient of six Maryland State Arts Council Awards, five film-festival awards internationally, a Changemaker Challenge Award from United Way of Central Maryland and Horizon Foundation, an aSHE Fund Micro-Grant, and two Baker Artist Awards in interdisciplinary arts. She has been awarded a Storyknife Writers Residency, a NES Artist Residency, and an Official Citation from the Maryland House of Delegates.

Pamela Woolford is the author of more than 100 memoir, fiction, profile, human-interest, and think pieces published in The Baltimore Sun, Poets & Writers Magazine, NAACP's Crisis Magazine, Harvard University's Transition, and other publications. Her writings have been selected for anthologies, translated into German, and widely cited. In 2020 she was the Bisson Lecturer in the Humanities at Marymount University.

Her multimedia project Antoine and Me is featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art through 3/12/23. Her retrospective virtual-reality experience Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows premieres in 2023.
 

W. Luther Jett

Click here for Luther Jett podcast

W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. Luther's poem "How Many Fingers", published in Bourgeon, was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. His poetry performance piece, Flying to America, debuted at the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival in Washington D.C. He is the author of five poetry chapbooks: "Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father", (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and "Our Situation", (Prolific Press, 2018), "Everyone Disappears" (Finishing Line Press, 2020), "Little Wars" (Kelsay Books, 2021), and "Watchman, What of the Night?" (CW Books, 2022). Luther is also the facilitator of a monthly virtual open mike sponsored by the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project in Hyattstown, Maryland.
 

Joel Dias Porter

Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade) originally from Pittsburgh, PA & currently resides in South Jersey and Maryland. The 1998 & 1999 Haiku Slam Champion, his poems have been published in POETRY, Mead, Best American Poetry 2014, Callaloo, Antioch Review, Red Brick Review, & the anthologies, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, and Catch a Fire. A Cave Canem Fellow, he also received the Furious Flower "Emerging Poet Award" in 1995. His next collection "Ideas of Improvisation" comes out today from Thread Makes Blanket Press.

Pulitzer Prize Winner William Meredith served as U.S. Consultant In Poetry to The Library Of Congress, 1978-1980, a term now known as U.S. Poet Laureate,

Commentary by Grace Cavalieri

20th Century Poets William Meredith


Josephine Jacobsen was a Canadian-born American poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. In 1997, she received the Poetry Society of America’s highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Jacobsen lived in Baltimore, MD.

20th Century Poets Josephine Jackson

Click here to view the video. 

Click here to view the Grace Art website

Click here to view MANIFEST

18th century writer Madame de Stael is unknown to American readers - until now. She authored 40 books (novels, plays, political theories). She was part of a coup to unseat Napoleon. Why do we know the writers Rousseau, Burke, Godwin? And not a woman equal, in thought and action?

Now, French history, in the midst of the Revolution, is told with letters in the voice of Madame Germaine de Stael, imagined by Grace Cavalieri. All facts, dates, are accurate - only a woman writer's humanity is newly available.

Letters by Grace Cavalieri, with glorious photographs by Dan Murano.