Grace Cavalieri 

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate. Her new book is The Long Game, Poems Selected & New (The Word Works.)  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 and the CPB Silver Medal. She’s an Academy of American Poets Fellow. She’s written poems and plays produced on American stages. Women in history are her specialty and the last play produced was “Quilting The Sun” about ex-slave quiltmaker Harriet Powers. 2017 NYC.

The last 25 years of her podcasts have been sent to the moon from NASA on Lunar Codex.

Susan Okie 

Susan Okie is a doctor, a poet, and a former Washington Post medical reporter. She received an MFA in Poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 2014. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, and other journals. Her full-length poetry collection, Woman at the Crossing, was chosen by Garrett Hongo as winner of the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, and was published in October, 2023, by Grid Books.