Poetry Night Panel
Join us for a night of poetry to celebrate National Poetry Month!
Grace Cavalieri (The Long Game) was Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate (2018-2024.) Her new book is The Long Game, Poems Selected & New. She founded and still produces The Poet and the Poem for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 47 years on-air. She holds two Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Garrett, Columbia, Bordighera, AAUW awards and the CPB Silver Medal, plus others. She’s an Academy of American Poets Fellow. She’s had 20 plays produced on American stages. July 2023, twenty-five years of her podcasts were sent to the moon from NASA on Lunar Codex.
Described by Nobel-Prize winner Seamus Heaney as “one of the natural poets of his generation,” Michael Blumenthal (Correcting the World) is the former Director of Harvard’s Creative Writing Program, and more recently, Copenhauer Visiting Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Immigration Clinic at the West Virginia University College of Law. He is the author of nine previous volumes of poetry and a book of short stories, The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History, as well as the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers, the novel Weinstock Among the Dying, and a collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House. His non-fiction book, Because They Needed Me, was published in 2016. He divides his time between DC and the small Hungarian village of Hegymagas near the shores of Lake Balaton.
Anne Harding Woodworth (Gender), poet and playwright, is the author of eight books of poetry and four chapbooks, with a fifth, The Spare Parts Saga, appearing in March. It follows the arduous journey of Anne’s third book, Spare Parts, on its way to Ireland, courtesy of bizarre handling by the U.S. Postal Service. Her book, Trouble, received the 2022 William Meredith Poetry Award. Anne’s most recent book is Gender: Two Novellas in Verse. Her forthcoming Merely Players will appear in March 2025. Anne reads her poetry frequently, virtually and in person. She is currently at work on two plays with her sister, Bundy H. Boit.
Jean Nordhaus (Music of Being) is the author of six volumes of poetry include The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn, Innocence, Memos from the Broken World, My Life in Hiding, and, most recently, The Music of Being. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and numerous other venues. She has served as poetry coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library, President of Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and, for many years, as Review Editor of Poet Lore. She lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC and part-time in Taos, New Mexico.
This event will be moderated by Gigi Bradford, the founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Board and former Literature Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the former Director of The Academy of American Poets in NYC, the Folger O.B.Hardison Poetry Program, and the Center for Arts and Culture. Bradford has been teaching at Politics and Prose since 2006.
