This anthology of poetry by the members of the Capitol Hill Poetry Group celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding.
Jean Nordhaus, who along with Shirley Cochrane founded the group on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. in 1975, is still a member. This group of both long-term and newer members, who are the authors included in this book, currently includes the author as follows: Patricia Gray, Charise M.Hoge, Mary Ann Larkin, Greg McBride, Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, Jean Nordhaus, Patric Pepper, Noel Salinger, Rosemary Winslow, and Anne Harding Woodworth. They still meet every two or three weeks to read and critique each other’s work. The poets who have passed through this workshop over the last 50 years have published scores of poetry books and chapbooks, a testimony to their dedication to the art of making excellent poems.
Patricia Gray was born in Washington, D.C. but grew up, after the age of five, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. After receiving an MFA, she accepted a position at the Library of Congress, where she created the popular Poetry at Noon program. A selected participant at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in 2004 and 2006, she was a presenting author at South Carolina Book Festival in 2006. In 2023, her hybrid poem, “Morning of Wilderness and Wind” was a finalist for the 55th Millennium Writing Award. Also that year, Patricia won her seventh Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2025, her poems appeared in The Ravens Perch, Ground Journal, The Plentitudes, The Mid-Atlantic Review and Hill Rag. She teaches creative writing for The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland and enjoys the heck out of Zoom meetings with writers in the U.S. and abroad.
Charise M. Hoge, MA, MSW, is a writer, dance/movement therapist, and performing artist. Her work in the healing arts includes programs for hospitals, counseling centers, businesses, the National Zoo, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the World Bank. She is co-author of Meet Your Muse: The Dance of Creativity and A Portable Identity: Your Guide to Taking Charge of Change Abroad, and author of three poetry collections: Striking Light from Ashes, Muse in a Suitcase, and Inheritance of Flowers. Her poetry is also featured in the book Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers (edited by David Lehman). She has been a guest author for The Best American Poetry blogand featured poet for The WildStory Podcast. Based in the Washington, DC area, Charise and her husband regularly escape to West Virginia where she is poet-in-residence for Art on Cullers Run, Mathias. www.charisehoge.com
Mary Ann Larkin is the author of a full-length book, That Deep and Steady Hum, and six chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared in Poetry Greece, Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters, The Greensboro Review and other journals and in more than twenty anthologies, including Harry N. Abrams’ series on poetry and art. She was a co-founder of The Big Mama Poetry Troupe, a group of five feminist poets based in Cleveland in the seventies, who performed from Chicago to New York City. Larkin has taught writing at a number of colleges, most recently at Howard University, and written for NPR, NIH, Foundation News and others. She has enjoyed residencies at both Yaddo and the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. She co-founded Pond Road Press, which published Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh by Jack Gilbert. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she lives with her husband Patric Pepper on Cape Cod in North Truro, Massachusetts.
Greg McBride is the author of Guest of Time (Pond Road Press, 2023), Porthole (Briery Creek Press, 2012), and Back of the Envelope (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009). His work appears in Alaska Quarterly, Bellevue, The Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, Rhino, River Styx, Salmagundi, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His awards include the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry for Porthole, the Boulevard Emerging Poet prize, and grants in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. A Vietnam veteran and lawyer, he is the founding editor of the Innisfree Poetry Journal.
Jean Nordhaus’ eight volumes of poetry include A Bracelet of Lies (Washington Writers’ Publishing House), The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed Editions), Innocence (Ohio State University Press), Memos from the Broken World (Mayapple Press), My Life in Hiding (Quarterly Review of Literature), and, most recently, The Music of Being (Broadstone Books) plus two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and numerous other venues. Over 60 of her reviews, articles, and essays on dance and poetry have been published in The Washington Post, The Washington Review, and other publications. She formerly served as poetry coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, President of Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and, for eight years, as Review Editor of Poet Lore. She lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and part-time in Taos, New Mexico.
Patric Pepper holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Maryland and is a retired process engineer. He has published three poetry chapbooks, including Everything Pure as Nothing, from Finishing Line Press, and a full length collection, Temporary Apprehensions, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH) Poetry Prize. He has volunteered in various roles with small press publishers and organizations since the mid 1970s as a reviewer, reader, book designer, facilities manager, board member, various clerical roles, and president for six years of a 501(c)3 cooperative publishing house, WWPH. Patric is a founding editor of a poetry micro-press, Pond Road Press, which has published 15 books and chapbooks to date, including Jack Gilbert’s Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh. His poetry and reviews have appeared in various journals and magazines since 1974, most recently in the WWPH anthology America’s Future, Backbone Mountain Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Full Bleed, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. Pepper lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Mary Ann Larkin.
Noel Salinger joined the Capitol Hill Poetry Group recently. He retired in 2018 after a 40-year career in non-profit development, mostly at the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago, and the Smithsonian. Since retirement from decades of professional writing, Noel has returned to poetry, which he has been writing since his teens. Noel attended Syracuse University, where he studied poetry writing with Stephen Dunn and Philip Booth, and earned a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He lives with his wife LeAnne Sawyers, a painter, and her mother in North Potomac, Maryland.
Rosemary Winslow. When four, sitting on the floor listening to my father read from the King James Bible, I became aware that the sounds were waves in the air. I was in awe at the beauty and fell in love right there with the sounds of poetry and music. I wrote poems in loops of e’s before I knew how to read. First poem: age seven. I’ve published two books of poems, co-edited a book of essays on beauty, written dozens of researched articles on poetry, rhetoric, and writing, including entries on prosody, meter, versification, pitch, and others in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth Edition, The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and numerous journals. She and her husband, John Winslow, host poetry readings—Sounds on M Street—in his painting studio. She taught literature and writing for 50 years. She is retired from the faculty of the Catholic University of America.
Anne Harding Woodworth, poet and playwright, is the author of nine books of poetry and five chapbooks. Her book, Trouble, received the 2022 William Meredith Poetry Award. Her chapbook, The Last Gun, won the COG Poetry Award, and an excerpt of it was subsequently animated (see https://vimeo/193842252). Anne’s most recent book of poetry is Merely Players, which focuses on performance—including theatre, cinema, dance, magic, mime, music, puppetry, even the soccer field. Anne reads her poetry frequently, virtually and in person. She is currently at work on two plays with her sister, playwright Bundy H. Boit. When Anne is not in Washington, D.C., she can be found at her cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Moderating this group poetry reading will be Grace Cavalieri, who founded and produces “The Poet and The Poem” from the Library of Congress, celebrating 48 years on-air. Her poetry is included in The 2025 Best American Writing Anthology . She’s the author of 30 books of poems and fiction; and 20 plays on American stages. 250 years of her podcasts went to the moon on lunar codex, from NASA.